Wubi+Hardy Heron

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron came out and I wanted to check it out to see what was new. I only had one machine that was fast enough to evaluate the distro, my Gateway ML3109 laptop with a Celeron M processor and ATI Radeon graphics. It was running Vista and I didn't want to fool around with making new partitions or fooling around with a bootloader. However, after reading an ars technica review of Hardy Heron, I discovered I could use Wubi to install the distro on my laptop as if it was a normal Windows program. Better yet I could easily just uninstall it as well.

So I ran the installer, the installer downloaded about 500MB or so of files. The next time I booted up the Windows boot loader was presented and gave an option of Ubuntu.

I had played around with 7.10 on an old P3 with 384MB of RAM and was satisfied with it. I was anxious to see what 8.04 could do on the faster processor.

Here's my first impression after using it

• Flash: I wanted to watch a TV show on Hulu but when I got to the landing page it said I was missing a plug-in. I installed the missing plug-in from Firefox and I was soon watching my show.


• DVDs: This installation can't play DVDs by default. I had to install a bunch of different packages to get a DVD to play on the included Totem Movie Player. There are probably some copyright issues that these packages are excluded. I got hints on what to install from the Ubuntu Help program under the heading Playing DVDs. I followed the steps there to confirm that the DVD would play. Step 2 tells you to run the install-css.sh script. Be careful this will only work if you have the libc6-dev-i386 and libc6-i386 packages installed.
  
  After I knew I could play a DVD I installed VLC using Synaptic Package Manager. This is a much better choice for playing videos.


• Compiz: This is a package that let's you do a bunch of visual effects. I wanted to try out the cube so I did some research and found out how to configure it. To get it to work I had to install restricted ATI drivers to take advantage of the 3D capabilities of my graphics card.


• Sound: The sound volume was low compared to what I was getting with Vista. The DVD audio and other audio seem to be played through the PCM channel on the mixer. A google search gave me hint on how to open up the mixer to adjust the PCM volume. If you double-click the speaker icon it will open the full mixer. I adjusted PCM to full and Master to full and the sound is now adequate. I pretty much have to do the same thing on Vista to get decent sound as well.