Nerd Alert Ultra-specific nerdery.

I've been looking forward to getting the latest Ubuntu release 8.04 - Hardy Heron and at first glance, I'm a little disappointed.

Right out the gate, I wanted to connect to a secure webdav server (UWM PantherFile/Xythos) to get some back-up files. In Ubuntu 7.10 this was pretty easy: Places>>Connect to Server>>Secure WebDAV (HTTPS). This option was removed in 8.04 for some reason. It looks like I need to get some third party software like: cadaver to get it to work or wait for an update. Oddly enough, I heard that Mac's Leopard OS is also having network mounting issues.

The other thing I do on a fresh install at work is to bind the machine to my Synergy environment. Synergy client/server software allows me to use both Windows and Linux machines and use a single keyboard and mouse to use all the machines like a giant virtual desktop. According to the Ubuntu Forums and from my own experience, Synergy client pauses and dies 3 - 10 seconds into switching to the Ubuntu 8.04 machine unless the Synergy client is run as root. When it's run as root, everything works fine but, running an app like this as root does not seem like a good idea. Synergy is inherently insecure because all traffic is transmitted plain-text. For this reason, I run everything through SSH tunnels but even still running an app like this as root makes me feel a little exposed.

In all, it's worth the trouble as this machine is ridiculously over powered:
That's right -- the machine has 8 processors (dual quad-core Xeons) and 6 gigabytes of memory.

...which is where the next problem comes in. The machine has 64-bit architecture which I've never used before. I installed the Eclipse IDE 3.3.2, the CFEclipse plugin, and Sun Java 6.0 JDK with no issues. When I tried to install the Adobe Flex Builder 3 Alpha plugin, I got an error explaining that Flex 3 requires 32-bit architecture and Java JRE compiled for 32-bit. The error also states that this is possible but, I remain skeptical -- yet I will give it a shot tomorrow.