I'm – to use an American expression – jonesing to install Ubuntu 8.04 (The Hardy Heron) Beta, which has just been released (massive props to the distro team for their typically herculean effort). And this time it's going to be a full install, not an upgrade.

See, when I upgraded to Gutsy during its Beta phase last September / October everything went pretty smoothly but quickly went down hill. Six months of trying to diagnose why Compiz won't work on my desktop machine when it used to work perfectly (my graphics card hasn't been blacklisted or anything, it just stopped and has never started again) has led me to believe that some of the hacks that I had to put in place to get everything to play nice under Feisty all that time ago had survived through the upgrade and had made Gutsy more than a bit twitchy.

So this time around I'm going to do a full install, which'll let me do other things that I've been after doing for a while, like swapping some partitions around to give me more space in /home and also encrypting them whilst I'm at it, as I've already done on my laptop. Hurrah.

But of course, it's not that simple. I'm so terribly tempted to do it now, download the Ubuntu Studio Beta ISO (I prefer Studio to plain Ubuntu because I make a lot of use of the audio editing goodies) and install tonight, but I do actually need a machine to work on next week, it being Launchpad release week and therefore a week in which I need to be available at all times.

However, the week after next is a less urgent week, so I might do some instally goodness then. Expect a report on the Heron shortly afterwards.