After building my new quad-core computer (1, 2, 3), it was time for me to choose an operating system.In the past, I have been using both Windows and Linux on my home computers. But my primary PC has always been running Windows. The main reason was that I needed to use Visual Studio and running it under a virtual machine was not ideal since the resource requirement was high. This time however, I have decided to move my main OS to Linux.
During the past couple of weeks, I have been playing with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) beta version and I was pretty happy with the results so as soon as Ubuntu 8.04 was released last Thursday, I downloaded the image and installed on my PC.
I am happy to report that Ubuntu 8.04 recognized all the hardware (see the list here) with no issues. And the 2.6.24 kernel fully supports Q9450 and X38 chipset. The included proprietary new nVidia driver supports my 8600 GT graphic card with no problem and I could run Beryl desktop smoothly.
There are a few rough edges however. In beta versions, when I booted Ubuntu, the startup logo was correctly stretched to fit the entire screen (wide screen), but the production code somehow swapped to a 4:3 mode which is kind of annoying. The major issue though is with nautilus. Everything works fine in default mode (icon view), but as soon as I change the settings to list view, dragging and dropping would cause the whole system to lock up. I noticed this behavior in beta builds and had thought that it would be resolved in the production version. So for now, I will use the default setting.
