Dear Folks,
I have been visited by a magic elf from Barre and through his
generous and magnificent effort am currently running the latest
beta of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on one partition of my laptop. I
have been urged to give my impressions.
Firstly, WOW! I'm not given to gibbering froth-mouth ravings,
but I cannot overstate the graphical candy available if your
card supports it. While poking around today, I found in System |
Preferences | Appearance | Visual Effects, a three button menu
of None, Normal (the default), and Extra. Extra is what you
want.
Wondering what that choice meant, I closed the menu and
proceeded to fuss with email and browser. NOW when I start to
drag a window elsewhere I am presented with what appears to be a
rubber window. You can grab it and shake it, and it will bend
appropriately with the velocity one applies to the touchpad (or
mouse, presumably). It is most unnerving the first time you see
it, and then you get hooked into shaking everything in sight,
which obligingly bends and stretches until you let go, whereupon
it will settle gently into rectilinear shape. This will drive
some folks nuts that wish to hand-tile the desktop, since it is
iffy where the box will settle after releasing it. It is the
most useless thing since Clippy, but it is Way Too Cool not to
waste all day dragging things around.
Many of you may have technical questions which are currently
beyond me, but I can say that this upgrade was from Dapper to
Hardy with no E-F-G in between. I can browse my old /home
directory for things I still have on that partition (still
bootable, btw) and I'm looking forward to more-or-less complete
migration to Hardy.
I have been given this advice by Himself Himself:
"When you have completed migration from the Dapper partition, I
propose that we turn the dapper partition into a Linux Backup
Catalyst (LBC) partition. What the LBC will do is that when you
start it it will unmount everything but itself, and then back
everything up using partimage."
I'll try to bring the unit to the May meeting for interested
observers. Am open to questions and invite anyone to stop in
Marshfield to see it before then. 802.426.3541 is my #. I don't
answer calls from Out of Area, so be sure to not hide caller ID.
A (gigantic) tip of the hat to my consiglière, Flint.
Rick
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