The Irish Linux User Group will be having a PoTD (Pint of the Day) to celebrate the birth of Hardy Heron, on 1st May 2008 in the Long Stone Pub, Townsend Street, central Dublin. (map to the venue) 18:30 or so onwards

IrishTeam/HardyReleaseParty (see ILUG post about PoTD)
The Long Stone Pub

This bug has been plagueing me and a lot of others for some time. As I mentioned in Hardy Heron Countdown, below,
the desktop fails to load properly every nine boots or so. It’s usually though not always accompanied by this bug notice:

click on image to enlarge

I got fed-up putting up with it (especially as while it’s usually ok after a restart, sometimes I’m forced to take out power, including battery, before it restarts properly), so I went hunting the bug.
It’s described at http://bugzilla.gnome.org

gnome-session does not wait long enough for dbus-daemon to start

Apparently, this is what happens

dbus-daemon starts, then dies on SIGPIPE. This results in all dbus-dependent
desktop components to either die (SIGABRT) or misbehave.

Expected results:
dbus-daemon should continue to run for the life of the GNOME session.

Does this happen every time?
No, but in GNOME 2.17, it is much more likely to happen.

As the version of Gnome which comes with Ubuntu Hardy Heron is 2.22, let’s hope that this particular nuisance is gone for good.

I’m not yet sure whether to do a clean install or simply upgrade to the new Ubuntu.
If you have the same dilemma, check this out at HowtoForge

What to do after you install is covered by Tombuntu

I’m looking forward to the next version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04), due on April 25, as I’m hoping it will fix a few things I’ve been too busy/lazy to fix or track down myself.
These include mounting usb devices without having to reboot; Gnome not loading properly every nine boots or so; and some sound issues. Just to explain further the last two:

By Gnome not loading properly I mean that the desktop background loads, but nothing else - no menus or icons. Usually rebooting does the trick, but on at least one occasion I had to close down and remove all power, including the battery, before it loaded properly. I thought at the time that it might have something to do with a new beta of Songbird, but now I’m not so sure;

The sound issue comes down to Audacity, really. I was hoping that the new PulseAudio sound server would solve it, but it seems that Audacity is not compatible with Pulseaudio.The current common practice is to kill the Pulseaudio server in order to use Audacity. Apparently this also affects the video player MPlayer. Changes are in the works, but have not made it to the stable code base yet.
That’s a real pain, but perhaps I should just try another programme, like Rosegarden, though it seems too sophisticated for what I need. Sweep, perhaps? It doesn’t appear to save in .mp3, presumably for copyright reasons, though it does in many other formats.

One last thing: maybe I’ll be able to use Bluetooth with the new Ubuntu on my HP Pavillion. Not that I’d use it much. Just that it’d be nice…

Apologies for being so long in returning to this subject, as promised on December 15.
If you’ve read my entry Starting Bluetooth Services: Gutsy bootup problem from December 4, you’ll have read that my attempts to blacklist Bluetooth failed.

I’ve had some comments and emails about this, and it seems to be a particular problem with HP Pavillions. Thankfully, the solution I finally found on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug172660 (no longer a valid link, unfortunately) worked for me and worked for those who asked me about it.

Unfortunately it entails disabling Bluetooth. The tip is to disable Bluetooth by adding

exit 0;

at the beginning of /etc/init.d/bluetooth

In your terminal, type or copy this.

~$ nano /etc/init.d/bluetooth

Click on the image below to see where you insert exit 0;

If you have trouble getting into your desktop, see Aldeby’s comments at Starting Bluetooth Services: Gutsy bootup problem

I think I tried a different code before, but failed before, but this time 7.10 generic launched flawlessly
without any parameters in the boot menu. Aldeby’s advice to use nano instead of vim was the key - vim is too complicated for non-geeks like me.

Aldeby has a very good tutorial on HP Pavillions here:
Howto: Ubuntu on HP pavilion dv65xx series laptop

If this works for you I’d appreciated if you left a comment including what computer you have.