Ubuntu 8.04

After a few months of using Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), the arrival of Hardy Heron (8.04) was something I actually looked forward to – something that hadn’t happened since the arrival of Vista.  The main difference here was one cost £300 and the other was free – go figure.

Well, on launch day I waited patiently for the torrent to download (little did I know my broadband connection was faulty and running at a 10th of the speed it should have been) and quickly burned it to a CD.  In the meantime the auto-updater informed me that a Distro upgrade was available so I thought I’d try that in the hope of retaining most of my settings.

After much flapping and also downloading the “alternative installer” to compensate for the comically slow net connection, 7 hours later it had finished.

Well, the quiet splash worked – first time I’d ever seen it, sound worked, graphics drivers installed without fuss everything seemed to be working.  To cap it all, most of my existing applications remained in place – the ones that had released new versions that is.  VMware server had vanished but I can live with that.

Aside from the subtle but important improvements mentioned above, there are a few nice features bundled with the system, although you have to dig deep to find them.

Uncomplicated firewall

This is switched off by default and has no graphical interface, instead works with some simple commands in “terminal”

Usage: ufw COMMAND

Commands:
enable                           Enables the firewall
disable                           Disables the firewall
default ARG                     set default policy to ALLOW or DENY
logging ARG                    set logging to ON or OFF
allow|deny RULE             allow or deny RULE
delete allow|deny RULE    delete the allow/deny RULE
status                           show firewall status
version                          display version information

So to enable it, type

sudo ufw enable

Easy.

KVM

This is a virtual machine app, well the guts of it at least.  You need to download a couple of programs from the Ubuntu repository to actually get a new VM up and running, but this is just a case of typing:

sudo apt-get install virt-manager libvirt-bin kvm

in the terminal window.  When you run Virtual Machine manager it’ll prompt you to add yourself to the permissions before you can proceed, but it’ll give you the command line you need.

I was able to get Pupply Linux running in a virtual machine quite successfully, but although it says it can use ISO files by extracting the contents as is goes, it failed each and every time.  You need to burn the ISO’s to CD’s and let it run them.

Aside from these two the repositories are as packed as ever and I’ll give a run down of some of the best ones.