Ubuntu 8.04 was officially released as production code on Friday. I’d already been running beta versions of it on two laptops (or the wife was, I should say) so I felt that I pretty much was ready to take my production laptop to it as soon as it hit general release code.

All the public distribution sites were swamped, of course, but it was pretty easy to snag it via Ubuntu’s official torrent.

I burnt the iso out to CD and did a full clean install from it. It nice how little there is to backup when you run all your work through a windows virtual machine and all your personal life data lives on web based applications.

On my Dell D620, it loaded fine, detected all hardware, and was ready to go in about 15 minutes. I ran Envy to get the newest video drivers (nice that it’s included in packages now), and then followed the instructions for making VMWare workstation support the newest 2.6 kernel.

Encrypted LVM didn’t seem to be an option on my build, so I didn’t do it even though I’d been planning on it.

Also, Firefox Beta 3 started refusing to remember my bookmarks. I probably caused that by resetting it back to defaults initially, but got tired of that fast and moved by to Firefox 2. Really, probably should included a default browser in a distro that hasn’t made it to a general release.. but that’s just like my opinion, man.

Also, default fonts always seem sucky - am I the only one who notices?