Hardy Heron is hardly worth it

I've become quite partial to Ubuntu over the past year or so, having initially installed a copy of 6.06 LTS that had been in my possession for a dog's age. When 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) arrived, I waited a while to upgrade, but eventually took the plunge.

I liked what I saw, and eagerly upgraded to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) very soon after its release.

So this week, when I heard the call of the Heron, I dove in head first. It took a while to do the upgrade, what with the swarm of early adopters hogging the download bandwidth. Two nights ago, I was finally able to make a good connection with an authorized mirror, and let the installation process proceed overnight.

Boy, was I sorry!

The first clue that I was in trouble was when my system got stuck on a plain background screen (the cream coloured screen that shows up when you're logging in). I thought the install was just slow, but nope; it was definitely a crash.

The message I got was that the video driver firmware was not capable of dealing with the new version. But I at least thought I'd be able to proceed to a stable operating system. No such luck.

After much fussing, I abandoned any hope of being able to recover my 7.10 installation. Since I didn't have any important files saved on the Ubuntu box, I decided I'd just do a clean install. So, with much reluctance, I did a clean install of Ubuntu 8.04.

Nothing went wrong during the installation; and it completed with no troubles or error messages at all. Then upon rebooting after the installation, that's when the trouble started.

I again received a message that my video drivers were not acceptable, and Ubuntu threw me into limited support mode. Maximum screen resolution was a miserable 800x600, and Ubuntu was unable to identify my graphic hardware or my monitor.

What's worse, is that when I booted from the 7.10 Live CD, Ubuntu was able to start up in 1280x768 resolution - which is the resolution I used when Ubuntu 7.10 was still on my computer. Why a newer version of Ubuntu would be unable to recognize my video hardware and monitor when a prior version had been able to do so is completely beyond me.

You'd think I had learned my lesson, but it gets much worse from there. I'll wait until tomorrow to post that story.