RSS 
So I walked into class today and my buddy waves me over to sit with him. I look over once seated and see a nice brown screen with a progress bar. Apparently that morning he finally had enough of Windows Vista being slow (his complaint) so he decided that class was a good time to install Ubuntu, and he picked the upcoming release 8.04, which is currently in alpha 6. Now I know since I've been using Ubuntu on my laptop I've been a little less on the bleeding edge than I was when using Gentoo, but I didn't feel like being out done, so I decided to upgrade my nice stable Gutsy (7.10) to Hardy right then and there.
Easy really. Open '/etc/apt/sources.list' in your favorite text editor under sudo and comment out the CD source line and search&replace all instances of 'gutsy' with 'hardy'
then
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-update
Apparently you can also
sudo update-manager -d
and tell it to check for updates and then it will offer you the option to upgrade to the development version, but the console version is slightly more interactive when it comes across system files you modified.
It was a 1.8GB download for all my software, and that might be large compared to some people because I installed a bunch of open source FPS games a bit ago and they do have a habit of taking up lots of space. Thankfully the UBC pipe is very fat and in 14 minutes everything was downloaded and it then went ahead and installed and updated everything.
Reboot.
And volia! Nice stable desktop is now a bleeding edge Alpha quality desktop with all the latest.
The good: My laptop's graphics card, and Intel i965, is 'new' and desktop bling wasn't supported under Gutsy, but it is under Hardy. Awesome. I installed compizconfig-settings-manager and tweaked away for a while. Things are very blingy.
Firefox beta 3 is pretty fine, but my Google browser sync plugin isn't supported for now. Hopefully in a bit.
Surprisingly, my latex plugin for Tomboy still works so awesome!
Everything else so far has more or less worked.
The not so great: Sound initially completely failed to work. No sound card detected, and the sound card module failed to load. Apparently a whoops over at Ubuntu HQ, they'd just compiled it against the wrong kernel. When I checked there was a 2 hour old bug. It was fixed this afternoon, and I got the fix from the update manager. Woo.
So everything so far seems to work. However things do crash every now and again. 'Eh, it's alpha software, everything. I knew what I was getting into, I've done this before.
So rad, I'm pretty pleased and impressed. Such an easy update to the bleeding edge system. And considering it's still all Alpha software, stuff is running fine enough. And I have all the cutting edge toys.
Now the fun will be in the next month as everything moves from alpha to beta to release and all my shiny toys become stable. :D
I heart free software.
Update: Oh wow! Firefox 3 finally shows image's full alt over text, which is fantastic because several comics I read have second punch lines there and previously you had to look at the image properties to get the full thing (lame). So awesome they fixed that.
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