After putzing around with Ubuntu 8.10 Beta for the last week, I am marginally impressed. I might be slightly biased in that 8.04.1 is working very well and that I have it deployed throughout my little home network. I rarely come across an issue that prevents me from doing what I want with Hardy Heron. With Intrepid Ibex, things have been a little more difficult. Naturally, part of that difficulty stems from it being still under development.

Here are the issues that I’m having the most trouble with:

Remote Desktop Viewer

Remote Desktop Viewer (Vinagre) 2.24.0 is very sluggish when connected to one of the other laptops in the LAN. I sit and watch the remote cursor go nowhere for minutes. Using 0.5.1 with Hardy is fine.

gksu Crashes

The window that appears to ask for permission to perform administrative tasks, for applications such as Synaptic and Update Manager, crashes. The gksu package has had plenty of bug reports in this regard. I found it applicable to compiz in that if I set Visual Effects to none, the window appears with no issue. Tonight saw updates for compiz, update manager, and synaptic. The issue still persists.

Dark themes

Since this site’s popularity has been driven by the workaround for OpenOffice.org with dark themes, I thought it pertinent to see how they interact with 8.10. So far, things look good but only with Ubuntu-installed dark themes. The third-party themes that I’ve enjoyed in the past require the use of the ubuntulooks gtk engine which is not installed by default. To install it would cause other packages to be removed including ubuntu-desktop. Since ubuntu-desktop helps to ensure proper upgrades, removing it is not an option.

Strange update messages

I’ve noticed on a few occasions that some updates kick out strange parsing errors.

WARNING: Failed to parse default value `??????????? ?????? ;gtk-theme-selector.desktop,???????????? ??????????? ???;default-applications.desktop,??????????? ????;gnome-cups-manager.desktop]’ for schema (/schemas/apps/control-center/cc_actions_list)

I can only guess at what the root causes are. Fortunately, they have been addressed through bug reports.

Power management

The screen-saver seems reluctant to take over. The screen proceeds to darken to black, but then immediately pops back on. If I relied more on battery power for the laptop, I wouldn’t be able to venture far from an A/C outlet.

Not all is bad. Some areas have had feature improvements. Synaptic Package Manager now provides a Quick Search box that makes finding packages a lot faster. The Fast User Switch Applet has been expanded to include the Power Off Applet functions and the ability to launch the Guest session that I’m currently not very fond of. Nautilus seems to enjoy my NFS share from my server better. I mount it to a directory in /media so it shows up on my desktop for a quick, one-click access.

I saw at another Ubuntu-related site that they were encouraging users to upgrade from Hardy to Intrepid on the basis that they’ve worked out most of the bugs so far. I would recommend that users hold off for a little while longer if you depend on your computer for daily tasks. The last thing you would want to do is upgrade to a system that is still being developed. Also keep in mind that Ubuntu Hardy Heron, now at 8.04.1, is the latest LTS release meaning you get three full years of support for the desktop. Unless you want the latest and greatest, there’s no real need to upgrade. I’ll be keeping at least two of my computers running Hardy Heron until at least 10.04 comes out.

However, if you are fortunate to have an extra computer in which to help load test the Beta, feel free to install it. The more bugs we find now, the more reliable 8.10 will be when it officially launches.

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