Hairy Hardon is the most cancerous Ubanto yet
A while ago I got tired of messing with ndiswrapper to get my wireless internets to work, so I switched from Debian back to Ubanto Ubuntu, because despite everything else, the restricted drivers manager is pretty nice. Today a new edition of Ubuntu came out (8.04, Hardy Heron), and while these new editions tend to add needed features (for instance, in 7.04, the restricted drivers manager couldn’t deal with my video card; 7.10 fixed that), each new edition also seems to go out of its way to break things in creative ways, and packs on tons of bloat, so I was rather wary of upgrading.
And rightly so, it turns out.
For one thing, my wireless stopped working again. No idea why. My video card driver (also non-free) still worked, though.
Then I noticed Firefox was much slower, and the standard buttons were more Web 2.0, and the address bar was completely useless for entering URLs, and all of my buttons in the status bar were missing: for some reason, Hardy Heron comes with Firefox 3.0b5, which broke all of my installed extensions (to wit: Flashblock, Live HTTP Headers, Long Titles, NoScript, QuickJava, TorButton, Web Developer; AdBlock Plus claimed to still work, but didn’t).
And suddenly half the websites I frequent looked like ass, either because of Firefox 30b5’s default settings or because Hardy Heron decided to randomly drop some fonts.
And it seems my screen’s brightness was stuck on maximum, with no way to adjust it. I’ve never been able to adjust it under Ubuntu (though Debian deals with it just fine), but it used to be stuck on a much lower brightness, which was suitable for both dark bedrooms and dusty classrooms. Maximum brightness just gives me a headache and drains my battery.
So I reinstalled Debian. The wireless doesn’t work there either, but at least it doesn’t take three minutes to boot (seriously, three minutes; 7.04 went from power-on to fully running in fifteen seconds flat).
Hardy Heron might be marginally alright for desktops, but for laptops it’s once again worthless. Which sucks, because now I have to find a different distro to advise newbies to use, and PCLinuxOS is a stupid, stupid name.
echomikeromeo said,
April 25th, 2008 at 4:56 am
7.04 never took 15 seconds for me.
I would still advise Ubuntu for newbies. Isn’t anyone coming from Windows or OSX used to bloat?
I think Fedora’s the next-most friendly newbie distro, though.
echomikeromeo said,
April 25th, 2008 at 4:57 am
However, the only distro I’ve ever got to recognize my wireless is Ubuntu - then again, I have absolutely the worst wireless card in the history of Linux. Linksys WPC54G v. 2 is the only one that seemingly never works.
pvinis said,
April 28th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
instead of upgrading… make a clean install of 8.04. i have the alpha and the beta…. they all worked perfectly good. firefox 3 still sucks at addons, but it soon will support them all.
Cairnarvon said,
April 28th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
I got my wireless to work under Debian, so now there’s no reason to prefer Ubuntu over it left~
/prog/ said,
May 6th, 2008 at 2:59 am
Congratulations, Xarn, this page is the #1 result on a Google search of “hairy hardon”
/prog/ said,
July 14th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Congratulations, Christopher, this page is the #5 result on a Google search of “ubanto”
Cairnarvon said,
July 14th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Christopher is that other guy.
growingneeds said,
August 3rd, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I managed to fine-tune the LCD brightness to a greater degree by adding the ‘Brightness Applet’ to the Gnome Panel.
1.Right-click a specified location on the Gnome Panel and select ‘Add to Panel…’
2.Select ‘Brightness Applet’.
To achieve 7 adjustable levels of brightness on the function keys (instead of the usual 3), and to keep the LCD brightness from being set at the maximum after every reboot:
1.In a terminal, type “gksudo gedit”.
2.Open the file “/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist”.
3.Add a new line “blacklist video”.
4.Reduce brightness to mimimum (or desired level).
5.Reboot.
Cairnarvon said,
August 8th, 2008 at 12:44 am
The brightness applet doesn’t seem to do anything for me, but I get seven levels of brightness through the function keys by default.