Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released

LarryBoy writes "Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) alpha 4 was released Friday and Ars Technica has a look at what's new in the latest builds of Hardy Heron. 'Although many of the significant architectural features like PulseAudio and GIO are still in transitional stages and aren't fully functional yet, Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 4 is still very impressive. I'm a big fan of D-Bus and I'm very pleased to see it being adopted throughout the entire desktop stack in core components.'"

Comments

PulseAudio works nicely in Fedora 8

[crush]

PulseAudio works great in Fedora 8. That's not really surprizing as the primary developer is a Red Hat employee (see http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Interviews/LennartPoettering ). It's weird the way Ubuntu advocacy pieces rarely mention that most of the software which is touted as being part of the Ubuntu experience is usually programmed by Debian or Red Hat or Novell developers.

Re:PulseAudio works nicely in Fedora 8

[Matt Perry]

However saying that it is your own work is quite different.

No Ubuntu developers have claimed someone else's work as their own. The GP is just upset for some strange reason that Ubuntu, like all other distros, incorporates code from other distributions into its own. All distros do this, and most companies that release Linux distros employ developers to work on existing and new projects.

Re:PulseAudio works nicely in Fedora 8

[Anonymous Coward]

And Launchpad is part of Ubuntu how, exactly?

More to the point, though Launchpad isn't yet open source, Canonical have made a commitment to open sourcing it. The reasons for it not being done yet are well documented - Shuttleworth himself explained things at length in a blog post some time back. They've already open sourced Storm.

So Launchpad isn't open source, but using that to level an accusation of Ubuntu being closed source is a fairly radical interpretation of the facts.

Re:PulseAudio works nicely in Fedora 8

[Cato]

This is complete crap - not only is Ubuntu 100% open source, with standard source packages, it is the root of many other distributions and almost encourages people to fork Ubuntu - e.g. Mythbuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Linux Mint, Fluxbuntu, and more. They do release their own contributions and actively merge them upstream into Debian, so they are also helping every other Debian-based distro (e.g. Sidux, Knoppix, SimplyMEPIS and many others).

How did this get moderated insightful?

Re:ndiswrapper

[2sheds]

You mean PolicyKit? Surely granular user privileges are a good thing in this day and age? It's a D-Bus interface anyway, hardly super weird.

nautilus is undergoing big changes

[sayfawa]

The warning to not use alpha releases on production machines is a bit more severe this time. So watch out.

Snipped from the release notes:
Nautilus can behave erratically, especially in trash operations. Refrain from operating on valuable files with this version. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/185756

Re:Yet to be impressed

[mike_sucks]

Check your facts, it has been doing this for years.

I click on a PDF link in Epiphany and it downloads the PDF and opens it in Evince (or whatever is registered as the primary PDF handler). If the website annoyingly opens a new window to show the PDF in (as if you have the plugin installed), Epy even helpfully closes the empty window for you.

This works for all registered content types, not just PDFs. If on some occasions it does not work, it is because the server is misconfigured and is sending the wrong MIME content type. /Mike

Re:ndiswrapper

[el americano]

Yeah, but you're just one guy. If it works for the vast majority, then that *does* cut it. I also object to your comparing pre-installed Vista, with a Ubuntu you set up yourself. Pre-installed Ubuntu is available, and it comes with everything working - I can tell you're shocked. When your only criticism is getting everything working for the first time, you're setting up pre-installed Vista to win the comparison.

To add my experiences with Ubuntu (and being more specific) I had troubles with Ubuntu 6.06 on my T42 ThinkPad trying to use wireless security, although connectivity and WEP worked straight off. Later, Ubuntu 7.10 had a greatly improved NetworkManager. It's everything thing I need. My hat's off to those guys. Even VPN works beautifully through the same interface.

I do hope an open source 11n driver comes out soon. It's really up to which chip vendor wants write one, and it was in this area that I had hopes for the Dell/Ubuntu laptops. If they want to ship 11n, then they'll push someone to support it. You see, your characterization was mistaken. You said:

HP, and Microsoft, fixed the issue with the Broadcom wireless driver

No they didn't. Broadcom fixed it. HP forced them too, and Microsoft did nothing. That's the way it's going to be. Once HP and Dell care, Linux support will be there before the product is shipped.

Re:ndiswrapper

[JayAEU]

I've installed PCLinuxOS 2007 as a replacement for Windows XP on my wife's 6 year old laptop some 7 months ago. What shall I say, it's an absolute blessing! Boot times of 30 seconds instead of several minutes, no crashes and - best of all - everything just works, including the wireless PCMCIA card.

My wife couldn't be happier.

And you can rest your mind, PCLinuxOS 2007 doesn't put all users into root. If something requires administrative privileges, it will ask for the root password, which is where I come in, if it happens to my wife.

Anyway, in terms of ease-of-use, PCLOS is still much ahead of Ubuntu. I wouldn't run PCLOS on a server, but on desktop and mobile systems, it's top notch.