After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray …

After 4 good releases, Ubuntu let me down with 8.04. Maybe it was the timing - I upgraded my laptop as part of restoring it from a hard drive crash a few weeks ago - but isn't a brand new disk a good time to change your OS version? 

 On the upside, Hardy was the first OS I've installed where I opted to keep the default wallpaper (the bird is purty). And I'm pretty sure suspend (nVidia driver and all) was working better than previously, which is always good news. 

But I no longer had use of the VGA port for cloned or extended desktop, and I was unable to find a solution. That's a dealbreaker for anyone who needs to do frequent presentations (or, for that matter, uses their laptop as a primary workstation and has a > 15" monitor).

Worse, vpnc was, at best, squirrelly. I do quite a lot over VPN, and we still have two of them (Sun & MySQL). My sunray …

The MySQL Con has done something amazingly intellegent. Taped down to the floors in all the session rooms and meetings rooms, there are power strips. No matter where you sit, there is a powerstrip within a couple of meters. So instead of spending time looking for power outlets and having clumps of people gathered around the few outlets around the walls, you can sit where you want, and take notes and do research while listening and speaking.

This is something that all other tech conferences would do well to emulate.