General: Ubuntu 8.04 Gets Update

Hardy Heron has had a luke warm reception at best by the community, made worse by Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) being one of the best releases to date. Yesterday, 8.0.4.1 was released, which offers to fix most of the complaints received. When I get round to it, I shall have to reboot my machine and see if my onboard sound finally works!

As I am now using Linux Mint, I was a little worried I would be left behind, but because of its Ubuntu origins I'm now fully up to date. As of yet, I've not noticed anything different, but then this is a bug fixing release and I've not been having any problems. This new ISO is essentially the previous version with upgraded packages and fixes, rather than an entirely new distribution in its own right. If you are using Ubuntu at the moment, your Update Manager should sort everything out for you.

One thing I did discover is that in the move to Hardy, the Gnome VFS has had an update. In Gutsy, Gnome's VFS was purely available at a GUI level - it didn't mount your connection to a folder on the computer. This is irritating if you want to jump to the terminal for instance, to manipulate a file manually, or in my case if your text editor (Scite) doesn't support ssh:// URIs. To get around this, I have been using FUSE, more specifically sshfs to mount my SSH shares as a folder on the machine.

The new GVFS uses FUSE in conjunction with it's own mature API, but doesn't replace it entirely. As well as the graphical mounting, it also mounts your connection via FUSE to "~/.gvfs". Gnome can tell if a program supports the Gnome VFS API, and if it doesn't, will give it the FUSEd URI instead. This means that Scite now works perfectly! This is seamless integration and well needed.

This really is a great step forward, but they have removed the ability to give your connections names! So on my desktop I now see a selection of IP addresses. On top of this, there still isn't a way of modifying a connections settings once it has been made - pretty obvious if you ask me.

While I'm in a complaining mode, I was a little frustrated yesterday when searching for a solution to a problem with an HFSPlus (Mac) formatted drive. The solution I found on the Ubuntu Forum was quite complex, and nobody had mentioned that in the newer releases there was a package available that gave you everything you needed. There are a hell of a lot of guides and how-tos out there, that are deprecated, yet there is very little mention of this. In a lot of cases, following what is put in these guides can break more than it will fix - especially in my case, attempting to get a Bluetooth headset working under Hardy. It really shouldn't be as difficult as I'm finding it.

I guess this is one of the frustrations of things constantly changing

A lot of the stuff there are guides for, *should* just work in the latest releases. Problem is, I turn to Google for answers and by nature, stuff that's been linked the most will come up first, which could be for older releases.

Maybe I should be going straight to the Ubuntu Forums and searching there, so I can get things in date order. I often find the best answers are on people's Blogs though.

I'll second that.

Yes! The update fixed it So I'm using it again as I like the audio ports at the front of the case

It even works with PulseAudio

well, that was a bad idea. My system is hosed. I booted off the 7.10 Live CD and am now typing this. I did clean install of 7.10 and tried again and it got hosed at the same spot. Looks like it hangs when trying to update locales en_US.UTF-8. It also seems like there is a bit of buzz about it on the Ubuntu forums. Lots of people are having the same problem. A lot of stuff is dependent on that and one is X-server. I can only get in to a command prompt (or whatever the Ubuntu equivalent is called). I have tried some of the fixes suggested in the bug thread but they are not working for me. I may just put 7.10 back on and wait for 8.10.

D'oh!

Didn't you boot from the LiveCD first?

Got my PDA working again thanks to the thread here. For those interested in the Gutsy to Hardy upgrade issue you can look at it here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+bug/249340