On...Installing Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”

The download from Canonical only took about an hour – not bad considering it was completed within two hours of “Heron” being released.

I had already prepared the computer as best I could, defragmenting my Windows partitions to create a good contiguous free area on the hard drive (this was to be an install on a computer without Ubuntu already on it, I have “Gusty Gibbon” on another computer). Burned the live cd, popped it in and Ubuntu booted up. Went to the install option, and that is where the problems began. The system froze at the partitioning stage. Powered off, back into Windows to check everything still OK (it was) and decided to load from within Windows using the Wubi installer instead (avoiding the need to partition the drive). That worked well apart from one thing - the maximum resolution I could get was 800 x 600.

I therefore tried a normal install again. This time it worked fine and I created a new 20Gb partition and installed “Heron” to it, but with no change to the resolution. I then went back into Windows and removed the Wubi installation. Back to Ubuntu and tried to max out the visual effects setting which prompted the download of a driver which I hoped would cure things but actually made them worse, I was now down to 640 x 480!

I had previously used a “Gutsy” live cd in this computer to partition the drive and remembered getting a very high resolution, so I tried that next, hoping that installing “Gutsy”, getting the settings right and then hitting the “upgrade to 8.04” button would solve the problem. Took a very deep breath and crossed my fingers as the partitioner on the “Gusty” live cd is a bit more basic that that on the “Heron” one, and my choices were “use entire hard drive” and nuke all my data (obviously not a good idea) or use the rather unfriendly manual partitioner. Eventually managed to overwrite the “Heron” partition, and install “Gutsy” without any disasters. This worked fine, the resolution was actually too high now however when I set the visual effects to “extra” (and the system downloaded the new driver) it dropped to a comfortable level of 1024 x 768.

Hit the “upgrade to 8.04” button and after a longish wait – it worked! Bit of a struggle, but worth it in the end. No idea why I had all the screen resolution problems though.