That’s my Ubuntu desktop about 15 minutes ago.  46 degrees is about 115 Fahrenheit.

Avalon in Melbourne’s west hit 47.9 degrees this afternoon.

The ABC News website says that, “Six major fire fronts are raging across Victoria and residents have described smoke so thick it blotted out the sun and huge walls of fire ripping through forests.”

The sky is certainly very orange here in town.

Melbourne’s weather is in the top-5 Twitter topics worldwide… have a look at TwitterFall and select the ‘Melbourne’ filter.

Firstly, Ubuntu is a PC desktop operating system. It’s based on a Debian flavour of Linux and is an open source project. “Open source” means that both the source code and the distribution itself are freely available. It is not a proprietary, closed operating system like Microsoft’s WindowsXP, which is an alternative desktop operating system with which you may also be familiar.

Now the guys and girls in the Ubuntu developer community are dedicated to making the system easy to install, use and support. They release regular updates, just like Microsoft, to fix software glitches and enhance system security.

I was running version 6.06 (released in June, 2006) on my desktop and was aware that 8.04 (released in April, 2008) had been made available for download. I had decided to upgrade the system at some point in time, when I had five minutes to scratch myself. It wasn’t a huge priority because 6.06 was running well and I figured there would be the usual unavoidable dramas of downloading new disc images, backing up data, upgrading, fixing dependency and compatibility problems and blowing an entire day; not because it was Ubuntu, but simply because it was an operating system upgrade, something notoriously time-consuming in the PC world.

But imagine my astonishment, joy, surprise and excitement when the built-in Update Manager offered to upgrade my operating system for me! Here’s the dialogue that got my heart racing:

Just to clarify what this means: the operating system is offering to upgrade itself. At no charge. Just by clicking a button labelled “Upgrade”. Can you imagine the Microsoft “Windows Update” service offering to upgrade your WindowsXP installation to Vista, via the internet?!?!

No, neither can I.

Notice the “LTS” designation, which stands for Long Term Support.  This means that the development team offers at least three years of updates, patches and troubleshooting for this version.  New versions of Ubuntu come out all the time, but most are only supported up until the next release.  8.04 is the first LTS designation to emerge since 6.06.  Presumably 6.06 will be supported until at least June 2009, and this new 8.04 will be supported until at least April 2011.  For more info read the Ubuntu Wiki on LTS releases.

So anyway, I clicked the “Upgrade” button:

The progress bar continuously revised its “time remaining” estimation as it downloaded files of different sizes and my blisteringly-fast uncapped Australian ADSL1 varied (wobbled) in speed.

Soon the Update Manager had everything it needed. I received the following warning, which was OK and is largely self-explanatory.  Note that Canonical Ltd. is the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu development team, and offers contracted help-desk support for commercial (server) installations of the product:

Clicked “Close”.  Next screen: did I want to start the upgrade?  Yes please!  The download estimation was fairly close too:

More software was downloaded, packages were installed and applications were configured:

After an hour or so, I was prompted to reboot.  Hey, presto!  Say hello to Ubuntu 8.04 – “Hardy Heron”.

Some things I like about Ubuntu 8.04 over 6.06:

• Definite speed improvement. My primary workstation is a modest “Armapro”-badged PC from Westan running an Intel Celeron with 1GB of RAM.  It screams along.
• Nice visual effects. I got brave and tweaked the Desktop Visual Effects to enable nice window transitions, ALT-TAB’ing and even pseudo-”aeroglass” effects without a fancy video card!
• Latest software. The Upgrade Manager also kindly brought me up-to-date with several frequently-used applications, like Open Office (which was running 2.0, now 2.4.1) and GAIM Instant Messaging (now replaced with Pidgin 2.4.1).
• Bookmarks, user settings all preserved through the upgrade. As was browsing history, recently opened files, printer settings and other useful user data.  I did however appear to lose all my network shortcuts on the Ubuntu desktop.  These were reinstated without fuss however.

All in all I’m very impressed with the simple upgrade strategy that just worked.  I’ll be using Ubuntu as my desktop of choice for some time yet.

If you want to download Ubuntu to give it a try, go to the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Download Page.