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…
[...] 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 [...]
Hmm… I’ve been using audacious ever since Hardy alpha 4 was released…
Before audacious pulseaudio output plugin was released there was no support for pulseaudio direct output, however I could use the Alsa one just missing the pulseaudio benefits.
When I eventually switched the audacious output plugin to pulseaudio I only had to lower the buffer size to 500 in order to have the sound stream fluent.
I did have, however, some other problems after the upgrade which convinced me to do a clean install (just keeping my /home directory).
With the exception of these upgrade problems I find Hardy a good distribution, only samba client is not working properly (i.e. it doesn’t find windows shares).