In the evening I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) Alpha 5 i386 ISO using µTorrent. I downloaded the required torrent file from the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) Alpha 5 image download page.
I started the download on 7:56:41 PM and the entire ISO image, 728,012,800 bytes in total, was downloaded on 8:53:00 PM. So it took less than an hour to download the ISO, and hence the download speed was over 200 kB/s. I guess Megacable has silently upgraded the speed (again), so a big thanks to Megacable.
When the download had finished successfully, I burned the ISO image to a rewritable CD (CD-RW) and when the CD was ready I inserted it into the Acer Aspire 4320 and turned the notebook on. First I used the verify option to check that the CD-RW was correct. Then I installed Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 5.
With Ubuntu 7.10 I had encountered two issues shortly after I had installed this Linux distribution on the Aspire: the sound didn't work, nor wi-fi did the wifi. I was able to find a way to enable the wireless networking and make the sound work after some research on the Internet, and was somewhat hoping that those issues would be fixed in 8.04.
After Hardy Heron alpha 5 was installed, and the Acer rebooted, I did hear sound, so that issue had been fixed. When I tried to record sound from the internal microphone, I didn't get any sound recorded. But I didn't look further into it, and it might that this can be enabled via the Volume Control dialog, as explained in Making microphones work on the Aspire 4320.
More important, to me, the wireless network still didn't work. When I checked dmesg, using egrep to filter the output, I got the same result as with Ubuntu 7.10 (see: Removing the old version of madwifi):
john@throy:~$ dmesg | egrep -i '(ath|wifi)'
[ 24.155741] ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
[ 24.273315] ath_hal: 0.9.18.0 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, RF5111, RF5112, RF2413, RF5413)
[ 24.617856] ath_pci: 0.9.4.5 (0.9.3.3)
[ 24.666510] wifi%d: unable to attach hardware: 'Hardware revision not supported' (HAL status 13)I am afraid that this will not be fixed in the final version of Ubuntu 8.04, which is a pitty. On the other hand, it gives me room to look for solutions to make the wireless network work with a proper Linux solution instead of using a Windows XP Atheros AR5006EG driver and NDISwrapper.
Since it was already quite late, I decided to call it a day, and turned off the notebook. One final remark: I do like the heron desktop wallpaper a lot.