On Fri, 2008-05-09 at 06:59 +1200, Ian McDonald wrote:

I didn't post all the other reviews but I think Ars did a great job here:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/hardy-heron-review.ars/1

They took about the good things, the bad things and how to fix some of the bad things...

Ubuntu 8.04 for me was a persuasive marketing brochure for switching back to Debian Unstable, which I did a few days ago. I booted the Ubuntu 8.04 CD on my 2GHz x86 box last weekend. Took forever to boot. The installer was slick and graphical, but I kept looking fruitlessly for the 'Options...' buttons at various critical stages. Anyway, I just went ahead and installed it on one of my spare partitions, making sure (for caution's sake) to install the GRUB boot code onto that partition, not the whole disks's MBR. Before attempting to reboot, I booted off my old partition and mounted the new Ubuntu partition. On looking at the /boot/grub/menu.lst, it seems that Ubuntu has done a whole new disk addressing scheme, giving my SATA disk (connected to PCI SATA card) the address sda1, then my IDE0/0 drive the address sda2, IDE0/1 becomes sda3 and so forth. Anyway, I copied the GRUB boot record that the Ubuntu installer generated to my menu.lst on the main IDE disk, and tried to boot. No good. Confirmed my gut feelings about this new disk addressing. Booted back into old OS, edited menu.lst and making sure the disk addresses (eg 'hd0,0' etc) were correct. Damn thing still wouldn't boot. Another thought going through my mind is the damnable ubuntu 6-month release cycle. Gives the 'Sophie's Choice' of either staying with the same release point for a couple of years and ending up with stale software versions, or taking the punt and dist-upgrading to new release points and fracturing the system in dozens of often-obscure places. Ahh, Debian sid, like an old loyal trusted friend. The joke is that Debian's 'Unstable' is more stable than the 'stable' versions of many other OSs. Dear old 'sid' will never require a breakage-prone dist-upgrade, just a gentle incremental upgrade every couple of months, and if anything breaks it will almost always be much easier to recover than a big dist-upgrade. Debian's installer has smartened up some, but still honours the user's dignity by allowing the user to make informed choices every step of the way. The only slightly annoying part of the switch was with x.org. It seems that with 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg', one can only edit the keyboard settings, then the configurator just drops out. The #debian folks say it's some kind of transition to a new scheme of autodetecting everything. But my nvidia geforce card wasn't recognised. And sid doesn't have a version of 'nvidia-glx' which works with sid's default kernel. So I ended up having to build/install a kernel from source, then install the proprietary nvidia driver, and copy across the xorg.conf from my old install. But that was the only little bump in an otherwise trouble-free install process. Lastly, this experience delivered to me the biggest reward so far for my earlier decision to have /home on a separate partition. On booting into my new Debian install, and installing the various extra apps, all the ~/.[appname] directories were still there and recognised by the debian-resident apps. Cheers David