The silent Heron
THE devil made me do it.
This famous line from the 1970s comedian Flip Wilson kept playing through my head as I watched a progress bar crawl imperceptibly across my screen. The message on the bar did not provide much by way of assurances, shifting between “20 hours left” and “2 hours left,” to reflect the wildly fluctuating speed of my broadband connection.
I wanted the installation to finish sooner so I could see if my desktop computer, which I had so painstakingly tweaked to near perfection in the last few months, would survive the upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu Linux.
Ubuntu 8.04, or Hardy Heron as it is called, was released for beta testing over the long weekend, with promises of new features, cool software and better performance.
Yet there were ample reasons not to upgrade.
For one thing, nobody looks forward to an operating system upgrade because it is potentially disruptive. Programs and devices that used to work may no longer function if they are incompatible with the new operating system.
The upgrade is even harder to justify when the existing platform gives you very little reason to complain—as was the case with Ubuntu 7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon, which I feel is far superior to Windows Vista in speed, security and pizazz.
Two other factors held me back.
First, my last operating system upgrade, from Ubuntu 7.04, was just less than five months ago. To Windows and Mac users, Ubuntu’s short release cycle seems pretty strange. What’s even stranger is that the developers of Ubuntu have largely met their target of a new release every six months since the distribution began in October 2004. Ubuntu users may opt for the stability of their current release, or move closer to the bleeding edge with the latest version.
Second, I was inclined to forgo the upgrade, or at least hold off until the official release next month because my previous upgrade was far from trouble-free. I eventually got Gutsy running perfectly, but I had to do a clean install in lieu of an upgrade.
In the end, however, curiosity—and the desire to have something new to write about in this column got the better of me. I hit the upgrade button in Ubuntu’s Update Manager. which told me that a new release was available.
Doing so set in motion an eight-hour process in which Ubuntu downloaded and installed 1,631 files totaling 1,458 megabytes, then removed about 74 programs that were obsolete as part of the upgrade process.
This gave me ample time to watch a few DVDs I had saved for the long weekend and have dinner some time in between. After hours of going back and forth to the PC to check, it came down to one press of the “Restart” button.
I waited on pins and needles as the screen went dark and the BIOS messages came up.
Then, to my great relief, the start-up screen appeared. I typed in my password and I was in!
The new release features the latest Linux kernel, the core of the operating system, an updated version of the Gnome graphical interface and the beta version of the Firefox 3 Web browser. It also comes with Transmission, a popular BitTorrent client on the Mac; Brasero, a CD burning application; and a number of other enhancements.
As I expected from beta software, there were glitches.
The fancy desktop visual effects I had installed using Compiz-Fusion still worked, but my Emerald windows decorations were deactivated. A few minutes of tweaking brought them back. My desktop widgets, called Screenlets, also crashed, and the Nautilus file manager gave me some video crud in icon view.
To me, however, none of these bugs was as serious as the loss of audio. On Gutsy Gibbon, my PC was a wonderful jukebox; after the upgrade, it stands mute despite two hours of scouring the online forums and trying out different fixes.
This is ironic, since Ubuntu 8.04 touts the new PulseAudio standard as a way to bring order to the chaotic jumble of sound drivers that Linux users have had to tolerate.
I do hope someone from Canonical, the sponsors of Ubuntu, are reading this, because it is important. Sound must work out of the box and this problem needs to be solved before the final release gets out.
As noble as the objectives of the PulseAudio project may be, it is exactly the kind of thing that will send new users running and screaming to get away from Linux. Most users, myself included, don’t want to deal with terms like “sound server,” “RTP multicast sink,” and loopback audio, which are all part of the the PulseAudio Device Chooser, a truly cryptic piece of software. We just want to be able to play our MP3 files, our audio CDs and our videos.
My experience with Ubuntu and open source projects makes me reasonably confident that this problem will eventually get fixed, perhaps in a later update. In the meantime, however, Gutsy users would probably do well to hold off on upgrading to Heron until these basic issues are resolved.
