Oh… yes… finally I get to run Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” along with Windows XP as a dual-boot system! There’s a little story behind my eventually successful experience with Ubuntu that I’d like to share.

I had a bad experience with 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon a few months back. It was my first time installing Linux, and it was also on my new PC. The people who tried to help out over the #ubuntu IRC support channel were all baffled at why Gutsy Gibbon wouldn’t work with my graphics and sound cards, even with workarounds known to work being employed. I never managed to get Gutsy Gibbon’s graphics or sound running smoothly.

Yesterday I was one of the folks who celebrated the release of Hardy Heron. After I finally managed to download its disc image (thanks to Hobbsee for his advice and Assid and PovAddict for directly helping me obtain the image) and burn it onto a CD, I went to back my Ubuntu documents up and then ran the live CD.

There was sound! That meant Hardy Heron had worked with my sound card! At least for the live CD but I was highly confident it’d work after installation too anyway.

After clean installing Hardy Heron over Gutsy Gibbon, I restarted the computer… the sound continued to work but the graphics were still mediocre. No problem, I went to enable the, um, closed source, NVIDIA driver and rebooted…

And it was done. Everything worked. Everything. With hardly any effort and a lot of anticipation. Ubuntu was finally running smoothly! With desktop effects enabled by default as well. Things were just so beautiful.

EDIT [4/27]: I will put up a screenshot once I can. Right now, WordPress 2.5’s gallery feature doesn’t seem to be working for me and some fixes I have tried don’t seem to work for me. What a bummer. Hopefully I get it fixed soon though! Upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1 has now restored gallery upload functionality for me. Booya! Here you go, isn’t she beautiful?

The default Ubuntu desktop
The default Ubuntu desktop

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