The latest version of Ubuntu Linux was released last night.  I hopped on the download band[width]wagon right away, as I usually do for Ubuntu, every six months.  They put out new editions every April and October.  This new one is called Hardy Heron, and is numbered 8.04 which really just corresponds to the 4th month of ’08.

The previous edition was 7.10 and called Gutsy Gibbon.  The developers of the distribution have taken some very impressive large strides towards usability recently.  The big step in Gutsy was the ability to natively read and write to NTFS partitions.  Not really something you’d think about until it was a problem.  Gutsy was great, but on my new laptop it didn’t take full advantage of the hardware.  Specifically the WIFI didn’t work properly out of the box.  It would connect easily enough to open wifi hotspots but not at all to encrypted ones.  The issue was the chipset (Intel 4965AGN) was just a bit too new for the driver to make it into the kernel, the core part of the linux OS when Gutsy was released.  There was a way to monkey around and get it to work by adapting the available windows driver, but I haven’t had the time or patience to do it this year.  This time however the driver is there and works with no fuss at all.    The other big difference is a better utilization of my graphics card and system resources.  A small but significant unexpected improvement is that my extra mouse buttons now work, making web surfing a lot easier, and the transfer back and forth from Winblows easier.

These few small changes could make Linux my main desktop, only switching to M$ for minor unsupported things.  I don’t have time to do a harddrive install right now though.  It will probably be June before that happens.  It only takes 15 minutes, so I do have the time, but I don’t have time for any unforseen complications!  So I will wait and see.  Right now I will have to suffice with the LiveCD.  If anyone wants to check it out you can download it and burn it for free.  Just go to www.ubuntu.com and  grab it.  Throw it in the cd drive and get ready to experience OS freedom!  It doesn’t change anything on your system unless you actually install it.  Please be careful though.  I have found that if you are aware of a viable option, it’s way easier to hate the ways of Redmond.

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