Hardy, not so great!

I upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 when it first came. Ubuntu 7.10/Feisty was running fine before that.

Immediately after the upgrade things worked great. The Compiz effects were cool. The new NetworkManager seemed nice.

A week or two later I started to notice that random application would stop responding and at other times the gui would hang. Then one, I noticed the when I booted up the machine I would get an error at first “Internal error, failed to initialize HAL!” accompanied by the NetworkManager showing the network disconnected, even though the network was up and running fine — I could browse, ping and everything normally.

I did some googling to figure out if anybody is having this. The answer is: yes. The solution: no clear solution. At least I couldn’t find one that really applied to me. Also, I kept hitting old bugs from old versions of Ubuntu for both problems.

I ignored these problems for a few weeks, but it seemed the hanging was increasing in frequency — or it could’ve been that my patience running thin.

Finally, my machine froze up and did not recover during a reboot. It would freeze up right after icecast2 then mysql started. So I autoremoved both icecast2 and mysql hoping that would fix. No luck. … No its time to get dirty and look at the logs. …

I will keep you posted.