Hoary Is History

Last week I got a new 80GB hard drive. It's nothing special, just an older Maxtor model, but it doubles my internal storage space. GParted allowed me to copy all my data directly from the original HDD to the new one. I planned to resize the Linux partition to take advantage of the freed space, so I booted from the Ubuntu 5.10 Live CD. Yet, even when running from the CD, GParted insisted the Linux swap partition was active. I didn't want to waste time figuring out why and was sufficiently impressed with 5.10 that I decided to simply delete the Linux partition and its swap and install the new version of Ubuntu.

Declaring myself done with 5.04 Hoary, I initiated the 5.10 Breezy installer. I'm impressed. Almost everything worked perfectly from the get-go. ESD continues to cause problems because it monopolizes the sound card, but disabling sounds for events (System -> Preferences -> Sound) seems to be an effective solution. Alternately, you could killall esd before running certain applications or playing Flash (.swf) files; but you would have to restart the ESD process afterward if you wanted sound events for the remainder of your session. Ubuntu has made steps in the right direction—for example, processes can now share the mixer without custom configuration—but I hope the sound issues will be completely resolved in a future release.

I get a kick out of this new Nautilus message: