Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.
I’m close to running out of patience with my Pavilion‘s Ubuntu installation, and since I like to try and break things before I install something new, I made the jump from Gutsy to Hardy (which is still alpha) and wondered if anything would stop working.
Nothing yet, although there was a weird stutter between updates of bash. I recall something off one of the mailing lists saying bash had been miscompiled (is that right? am I remembering that wrong?) and as a result a lot of other things were crashing. In my case though, it worked after a slight half-step and hasn’t been an issue at all.
And pardon me for being a wallpaper fanboii, but that heron is amazing work. I really like that one.
By the way, was there always an audio preview for mp3 and ogg files in Nautilus, when you hover the cursor over them? I honestly never noticed that before. But the last time I used Nautilus regularly was … summer of 2006? 😕
I’m going to test a few things for the Hardy guide next month, then zap this installation and call it done. I need a machine that doesn’t take three minutes to start. 🙄
Motho ke motho ka botho 
It’s good to read your impressions about Hardy-Alpha. Believe it or not I have it running on an old Gateway Solo 9100. What’s the specifications you might ask? The ‘old’ 9100 is a Pentium 2, with 384mb of RAM, with a clockspeed of 233mhz. I have a 30gig hard drive installed which is the maxium this model can handle.
I cannot boot from the CD drive no matter how many times I “tell” the BIOS to go to the CD first. I had to install the hard drive in another computer and then reinstall it in the 9100. I’ve tried icebuntu, xubuntu, fluxbuntu, Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10, also alternate installs and the only one to work with it so far is Hardy?
It takes forever to boot(it seems), and the resolution will only go to 800×600, but it does recognize and boot from my USB flash-drive style Belkin wireless adapter. It runs at a snails-pace, but it is fun to work on and at times it can frustrating? Still, this old workhorse of a computer still works somewhat…
If you mean you’re using stock Ubuntu on that machine, then I salute you sir — you won’t catch me running Gnome on anything lower than 1.6Ghz or so. You have the patience of a saint.
On the other hand, if you’ve trimmed it down from stock, I still salute you. Tricky installations like that are quite gratifying when they work right. Cheers!
P.S.: Is your color depth set too high, by chance? One of the symptoms I run into with Ubuntu on older machines is that it sets the default color depth to 24 in your xorg.conf file, when older machines were only made to do 16-bit. Try changing that and see if you get a proper resolution. Just an idea. …
Yes, Nautilus has had those audio previews on hover for some time now.
A bug in Gutsy kept the Nautilus audio previews from working on a lot of set ups….