The upgrade took place the evening Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 was released. The upgrade took a long time primarily as the result of a slow internet connection. Total download size came to 830Mb of packages. Majority of the installation occurred while I slept, stopping only to ask me about modified configuration files and completed pretty quickly after. Following a  reboot, I found in the tradition of Ubuntu upgrades all my settings had been remembered; such as what applications were open, tabs open in FireFox and desktop effects.

Below are my very first impressions from the hours immediately following the upgrade, symbols indicating what I didn’t like, was uncertain about and liked.
- much, much longer boot time
- weak stability, crashed twice in a matter of hours after upgrade.
- current graphics card insufficient for advanced desktop effects.
~ FireFox 3 beta – url bar bulky, some beloved extensions aren’t supported,
+ better management of system resources, CPU less busy.
+ power management when using battery seems better – need to do more testing.
+ normal desktop effects more stable.

A month later

After a few minor updates the system has stablised considerably and I haven’t experienced any further crashes akin to the first few immediately following upgrade. I’ve discovered some very useful browser extensions which have somewhat replaced ones not yet supported by FF3.

Discovered that there are difficulties getting sound to work everywhere; I must choose whether to use sound in a browser or everywhere else. This is an ongoing annoyance which is somewhat circumvented by using Miro to watch youtube videos and downloading pod and vodcasts instead of streaming from websites. While not dissimilar to how I’d usually deal with such media, the limitations have changed my behaviour somewhat. I’m also required to restart X when I have to watch or listen to something in my broswer in order to be able to have sound in VLC, Miro or Rhythmbox after. Need to seek assistance with getting the sound problems fixed. I suspect if I change my audio server settings I can recify this problem. PulseAudio installation and configuration may demand a separate blog post.

Overall I’d have to say I’m reasonably content with Hardy, some of the limitations I’m experiencing are a result of my mildly dated hardware and not the operating system. I’ve also discovered applications that are equivalent to those enjoyed by my fellow Windows and Mac user friends. Expect a joyous update when I solve the current audio frustrations.

This application initially interested me as I often get video’s in my rss feeds that I do want to watch but not always at the exact moment I have the item open. It’s untidy and inconvenient to have several pop-out windows loading at once and sometimes the environment isn’t conducive to watching videos. Previously I’ve also found watching videos from browser windows to be laggy and sometimes they fail to load entirely.

What particularly impressed me about Miro is the ability to download videos only when I want to see them, but also that the downloaded videos can be set with an expiry after which they’re automatically deleted to free system resources. I like to watch BoingBoingTV and VLog ‘episodes’ but don’t need to retain them after viewing. The channel searching and browsing is novel but I don’t foresee that I’ll use that feature often. Searching and downloading clips from YouTube to watch later is useful and searching is quick and quite accurate. The ability to limit bandwidth used by Miro is good and there are plenty of options regarding how often you’d like new videos in the channels you’ve added to be downloaded and managed.

Miro did crash a number of times while downloading videos however after restarting, the application instantly picked up where it left off. Given that Miro 1.1 was released a mere 10 days ago, a couple of initial crashes can be forgiven. It has been running quite stable since.

Extra kudos must be given for having installers with simple clear instructions for Linux, Windows and Mac systems. Within the Linux installation page, Ubuntu had it’s own guide with instructions for installation on either of the three latest Ubuntu releases.

In summary I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far of Miro. For me it is a great way to store and keep short videos for later viewing. I don’t plan to use Miro for large file and playlist management but according to the website it’s more than capable of doing that. Have an explore, it’s refreshing to find such a great application that solves a long-standing niggling problem.