After an agonising wait on Thursday for the latest Ubuntu to be released I finally managed to download a copy of the Hardiest of Herons, Ubuntu 8.04. Every six months, with each new Ubuntu release, I format my Ubuntu partition and start again, cleansing my computer of all the 'testware' that I installed since the last format. I wanted to allow plenty of time for tinkering so I decided to put off the format until Friday (with it being a public holiday). I burned the Hardy ISO to a CD and got some sleep. The next morning I began the upgrade. I booted up the live CD and set the install in motion before getting thrashed at chess... twice. Next came a reboot and a nasty surprise: no network! After a bit of unsuccessful tinkering I decided that I must have had some special network settings that were lost in the format. In went my old Gutsy CD to see if I could get networking happening with it. Networking worked straight away, which I thought was strange, so I figured that I would just install Gutsy and then do a dist-upgrade to Hardy (and hopefully trick Ubuntu into letting me use my network :-P). After all that finished and I still didn't have networking, I jumped onto another computer and googled my network card to see if there were any known issues. Thankfully (I guess) there were. [A bug](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/136836) had been lodged on Launchpad, citing a problem with the drivers for my network card, and a solution had been proposed. A quick test and SUCCESS! I had network, and with came Internet. Now that I was finally connected to the outside world again I could get on with installing Ubuntu. I installed my video card drivers and enabled compiz. The first thing I noticed was a strange pink border around all of my windows. Luckily enough I had just opened Firefox and one of the first things to greet me was Google Reader and [a post from Tombuntu](http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/04/28/workaround-for-pink-shadows-with-compiz) regarding that very peculiarity. By following Toms advice I was able to replace the pink shadows with regular black ones. With my now problem free Ubuntu, I could get on with checking out some of Hardy's new features. The first addition I looked at was Firefox 3 which I thought was a fair improvement over version 2. Its a shame none of my plugins work yet (especially Firebug and Del.icio.us) but it will only be a matter of time before they are updated. The next thing I noticed was the policykit integration. I think that it makes viewing settings much simplier; if you only want to look and not touch why should you have to enter a password? I also like the new integrated weather/clock (it is currently 15 degrees in Brisbane at the moment :-)). As for the other features, you can check out [the Ubuntu site](http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/hardy/beta#head-e55186d5d312cfd6b8d74a407dbef271a1edfc46) for more of an idea. 2009-06-03T22:57:28+10:00 35 true 2008-04-27T14:05:00+10:00 2009-06-03T22:57:28+10:00 hardy-heron-the-hard-way