I took the plunge and installed Feisty Fawn Herd 4 on my main machine last night. Doing a dist-upgrade resulted in kernel panic when GRUB tried to load, so I threw in the Herd 4 CD, and did a clean install. (I know, I should be installing alpha software on my main machine, but it’s running so smooth so far…)

If you haven’t checked out Feisty Fawn yet, check out the wiki pages on Ubuntu.com for the different alpha releases (Herd 2, Herd 3, Herd 4).

It’s amazing to see how far Feisty has come just through the alpha releases.

Some random thoughts:

  • Codec installation is awesome. (See the Herd 4 link above). I tried playing a MP3 in movie player, it downloaded the MP3 codec, installed it, and it played. I then fired up Banshee, and Banshee played MP3 files just fine.
  • Looking at the Herd 4 page, the Migration Assistant has been included. I’ve been following the Wiki page for that since it went live. Though I don’t dual boot anymore, this is one of the projects I’m very excited about, as this will help in a big way to get users from Windows to Linux, and Ubuntu specifically. I may play around with my last Windows machine just to try this out. If you dual boot, please help test this.
  • My Sansa e260 MP3 player now shows up as a digital music player, and not a USB disk. Still can’t write to it in Banshee though.
  • Beryl works like a champ using their repositories.
  • Gnomebaker still wants root. I don’t know if this is because I’m using a SATA burner or not, but I applied the fix I previously blogged for Edgy.
  • I got Avant Window Navigator working with some help, I’ll post the how-to after this.
  • Feisty fixed my microphone problems I ranted about last night. Not out of the box, but it was quick. I double clicked on Volume Control on my panel, clicked “Edit”, “Preferences”, “Capture”. Then went to the Recording tab in Volume control, moved the slider bar up, and bam, my mic works in Sound Recorder and Audacity. Thank goodness! Herd 4 seems stable so far, and I know the risk I’m running in potential breakage as the betas and release come up over the next few weeks.