Hardy Heron is coming. Of course, that shouldn’t be news to anyone by now, since it would appear that everybody is blogging about it. It looks slick and loads fast, even off the LiveCD. But, there are still some “gotchas” that you might want to look out for with the Beta.
People have been having trouble loading the LiveCD. Certainly, I did. Now, I’m not a programmer, but I find it a bit disconcerting to put the disk in and re-boot, and find that I can’t even check the media from the menu. It dumped me into a busybox prompt. That leads me to believe that the problem may be with the boot sequence for the LiveCD, itself. Not good. The Arizona Team is holding an installfest on May 17, 2008. How is it going to look to all these inexperience people to see us having trouble getting the LiveCD to boot? Nope, not good at all.
I did get mine to boot. A holler for help on the Dev’s Forum resulted in a work-around (adding acpi=off irqpoll to the boot options got it to work), but it IS a work-around. It is NOT a solution. Now, I don’t want you to get me wrong. I appreciate that people found a work-around for me, so I could check out the LiveCD. But it is still a work-around, and not the slick “just works” experience that one would expect from Ubuntu. True, it’s a Beta. But that’s all the more reason for them to find a solution now, before the final comes out. And I expect that they will.
Later this week I may install it on the “playground” partition of my hard drive. It would be nice for me to know what Hardy Heron is like before I have to try to install it on other people’s computers. It would give me the opportunity to see what some of the new advantages are, to show them off. But that will come later this week. For now, I’m just happy that I’ve found a work-around.
