I have upgraded a couple of computers to Hardy Heron this last week. My desktop machine at work (Dell 620) went nearly flawlessly. The only hitch was weird screen resolution on one of my two monitors. That was fixed with a manual edit of my xorg.conf file.
Things didn't go quite so smoothly on my home machine (HP 1483w). The Nvidia video was fubarred, I unistalled and reinstalled the proprietary drivers, and finally got over the hump by running the nvidia-glx-new package (version 169.12+2.6.24.12-16.34) AND the nvidia-settings package. That provided me with a tool that I could use to notify my system that I had a widescreen 19" monitor. Once I did that, I finally obtained 1440x920 resolution.
More weirdness: Open Office didn't like the Java that was installed. Uninstalling/reinstalling the Java didn't help. I finally removed OO through Synaptics and downloaded the install straight from Sun. Even then I had to point it to the JRE.
Finally, I had a hard time getting VMWare back in business. It didn't survive the upgrade, and when I went to reinstall, I got compile errors.
Then I found this forum. I untarred the update (located here) and ran the script that came with it. VMWare was back!
However, my brother still has compile errors on his system (not sure what it is). He's going to wait until VMWare releases a version specifically for Hardy.
Another bit of strangeness: My second hard drive had exactly the same files on it as the first! This was resolved by editing /etc/fstab and changing it from /dev/hda to /dev/sdb1. Strange, but easy to spot and fix. Note: I was informed of a better solution, using the actual UUID of the drive. Now, its wandering is a thing of the past. Typical fstab listing: UUID=f13f7091-63a3-4d4e-b4b7-a8e7945f683f /home ext3 nodev,nosuid 0 2
Those were the problems. Now the benefits.
The Firefox beta is screaming fast! I had heard that that was the case, now I have experienced it for myself. About half of my add-ons survived, including my favorite, Adsense Notifier. Down Them All, Auto-Former, and Adblock Plus also work fine with the Firefox 3.0b5 beta.
I finally have "normal" desktop effects. My onboard video wasn't hot enough to get them in Gutsy without weird issues, but I finally have the fade-in, fade-out effects, as well as programs graying out when they are cranking away on a processor-intensive task. As much as I hated Windows' desktop fanciness, I must say that I enjoy how Ubuntu does it. I also notice absolutely no difference in performance.
I had to change the audio output plugin in Amarok to alsa, as autodetect didn't find anything. That took about two seconds to figure out. Amarok is back to fetching album covers from Amazon again, too. Hooyah!
Of course, let's not forget the warm and fuzzy feeling you get from running FOSS. Not only that, but my two-year-old hardware screams with Hardy on it. I wonder how it would perform with Vista?
