First impressions of Ubuntu Hardy Heron

A new Ubuntu Linux was released on 21 April. It is version 8.04, with codename Hardy Heron. So I upgraded my home desktop machine. Emacs still works and mutt still works so I am happy. ;-) For me there were two snags until now:

• I want the Caps Lock key to behave as an extra Control key. This worked before and it still works, but now when I press the Caps Lock key the light indicating that Caps Lock is on starts or stops shining, even though I only really use it as a Control key. See this bug report, which also mentions some remedies. I ended up adding some lines to my ~/.bashrc file:

  xmodmap | grep lock | grep Caps_Lock > /dev/null
  if test $? -eq 0; then
      xmodmap -e "remove Lock = Caps_Lock" -e "keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L" -e "add Control = Control_L"
  fi
  

• Firefox 3.0b5 is used. There are not yet versions of Firebug and Live HTTP Headers that are compatible with this. That is not good when you are doing web development. I expect that this will get fixed soon.

In light of that last issue I think I will keep the laptop from my work at the previous Ubuntu for a while until those extensions are available.

Update: Both Wichert Akkerman and Jeroen Vloothuis tell me that there is a Firebug 1.1 beta that works with the new Firefox. This was not automatically found when Firefox looked for updates. This version indeed works, though for me it only works when opening Firebug in a new Window.

All in all a big thank you to everyone who made another Ubuntu version happen!