Last night I took the plunge into Hardy Heron. I was able to do the upgrade on my Toshiba laptop by issuing the command ' sudo update-manager -D'. This command checks to see if there is a development release. The update took a couple of hours to finish. Once it was done, I had the 2.6.24-16 kernel, firefox 3 [let the frustrations begin(more on that later)] and a whole bunch of little goodies that just make things so much better.

   The first thing I checked was my wireless card (intel 4965). This card worked in Gutsy but monitor mode was not yet supported. Now it is working flawlessly. Kismet works along with all of my wireless hacking tools. The Power Manager Brightness applet now works perfect(gnome panel applet). I do get the odd crash now and then but nothing bad enough to make me go back to Gutsy.

The main reason I wanted to move to Hardy was to beat the server overload that has been experienced with all of the previous releases. I know you are not supposed to put the beta version on a production machine, but I can see no reason not to at this point.

On to my problems.

   One of the first things I found out is that firefox three was now installed by default. This broke all of my extensions but one or two. Most of my extensions I cannot live without, so I had to figure out a way to get rid of firefox 3 and go back to firefox 2. Synaptic removed firefox 3 but now all of my applications that were looking for the default browser did not work. I looked in Synaptic and found that firefox 2 was definately installed but for some reason none of my shortcuts would work. Upon further investigation I found that 'firefox' would refer to firefox 3. I found that the installed version of firefox 2 is now called 'firefox-2'. So I had to change all of my shortcuts to point to 'firefox-2' and not just 'firefox'. I also found that uninstalling firefox3 removed liferea. I also like to use 'RSSOwl' for my feed reader. RSSOwl was somehow effected by this update so I had to update the settings to include the firefox-2 command. Once this was done it was buisness as usual. Everything works great and I have absolutely no complaints so far.

BTW – I love the 'Edit Wireless Settings' in the nework manager. Great Idea.

Congrats to the developers for a job well done.

With every release it is great to see so much progress being made.