It’s the little things…
Just downloaded a .iso disk image using Ubuntu 8.04. The download completes and Firefox 3.0 (beta 5) pops-up its “Download complete” message in the bottom right corner of my screen. I click on that and up pops the “Downloads” list, with my ISO image at the top. I click on the entry expecting a Nautilus window to fire up on the folder in which the file downloaded, but no, it’s more convenient than that. I don’t know whether I have Firefox, GNOME, or Ubuntu to thank, but instead of simply being taken to the download folder, it automatically fires up GNOME’s “Write to Disk” dialog box. Why shouldn’t it I guess? What else was I planning to do with a .iso file?
Trivial perhaps, but sweet.
May 18th, 2008 at 4:20 am
What you running Hardy on? Desktop? Any hardware issues?
May 18th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Let me see. A cheap and cheerful Asus P5L VM 1394 motherboard, 2 GB RAM, an Intel dual core Pentium 2140 (if you’re thinking “Eh? A dual core Pentium?”, they are I guess, the “Celeron” of the dual core world and at 1.6GHz, mine’s the slowest of those Celerons, but needless to say it runs Hardy (and Gutsy before it, and Feisty before that) without even breaking into a sweat. An nvidia GeForce 7600 (chosen mainly because it was passively cooled and thus silent), and a 320GB Western Digital Caviar HD (also reasonably quiet). No hardware issues at all that I’ve noticed, and the machine has been running around the clock for the better part of two weeks now.
Everything is running sweetly. I’ve seen few of the irksome bugs I encountered during the first couple of months with Gutsy (until the updates swatted most of them, at least), although, bizzarely, gedit spontaneously shut down the other day, twice in the same day, which is pretty odd being such a basic app and all. I was too busy to go poking through the log files to find the cause, but it hasn’t happened since so hopefully it’s nothing to worry about. If it does I’ll do the requisite poking and file a bug report, if warranted. I’ve noticed that the GNOME system monitor hogs more than its fair share of the CPU (kinda ironic given its purpose), and noticed that there’s a bug report for this on Launchpad, so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon. I know, I know, the solution is to use top, or something comparable ;). I guess I should say that I’ve done less “playing” with Hardy than I did with Feisty and Gutsy, so that might explain why I’ve encountered fewer glitches. All the same, I’ve just got a better feeling about Hardy than I had with Gutsy. It feels generally less “niggly” to me.
The only real issue I’ve experienced has been with the Java support (Sun version), which is problematic enough that it caused me to downgrade from 64-bit Hardy to 32-bit the other day. The swap seems to have cured the JVM problems. But then, Java support has always been problematic on 64-bit Linuxes, it seems.
But Sun’s 64-bit JVM apart, no significant problems to report, I’m pleased to say.
Specifically on the hardware front, nothing to report there either. USB devices (e.g. external hard drive, memory card reader and Canon camera) all detected and working fine. My sound chipset and audio speaker system has been fine, despite the fuss about Hardy’s audio components. No hardware dramas so far.
I’ve also got 64-bit Hardy running on a three year old plus, AMD dual-core Athlon 4400 desktop, using an ATI Radeon X1800, 2GB RAM, and a 500 GB drive. Runs sweetly with no noticeable issues (although it’s had barely two days of use since install two weeks ago, so it’s not the best indicator).
My office server, with its single core Celeron, a Gigabyte mobo and 1GB RAM has been running the server edition of Gutsy (and Feisty before that) without any problems at all. Although like the AMD desktop, its duties are relatively simple and it has a pretty easy life.
Bit of a rambling, unscientific report I’m afraid, it’s almost bed time for me