Just in case you were curious, my longest post is "Making a ruckus over Ruckus" with 761. I've written 9675 words in 53 posts. That's on average 10 wpd and an average of 183 wpp.
So, the new Ubuntu distro has made it’s debut, and I can say I’m pretty happy with what it has to offer. The upgrade this time was a much less invasive process, compared to 6.10 to 7.04. It only took me about a total of 5 hours of work to get the machine fully upgraded, re-configured, and functioning again. The only thing that is kind of daunting about upgrading, is the fact that the updater wants to replace a lot of the config files with their distributed default ones. If you choose to replace or keep, no data is lost, but it can be a real pain in the butt to track down what is going on when something isn’t working. Overall this time, i felt more confident in what the updater was doing/replacing, so I guess I wasn’t as nervous as last time. From a desktop user perspective, this new distribution has some things that make it a lot more user friendly. I can’t really comment too much on these things however, as of right now I’m only running it on my server. I have seen a little bit of a performance increase, my load has dropped a bit, but the cpu usage has gone up. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of the tickless kernel or not, but regardless, as long as the system is stable and performs well, I’m happy. I would recommend the upgrade for anyone who is thinking about it, and for the people who have yet to try Linux, now may be a great time to take the plunge into OSS.
I just really finished setting up the new server. This is a Intel Pentium 4, 512MB RAM, 40GB HDD running Apache2, PHP 5 and MySQL in Ubuntu. It was a challenge to set it up, just like the first time on the ol’ K6, but was certainly worth the time and effort. I always learn a lot when I spend some time with my servers. Anyways, I will post some more interesting content soon, but for now I am just troubleshoot/optimizing my server and doing homework… I think I might be having a little problem with gZip in Apache, so if you notice weird behavior like you have to load the page twice before it shows or anything like that, let me know. Now… if I could only get some more upstream bandwidth… Alwell. Peace out!
Ubuntu, such a foreign sounding word… but I could almost say, it is my most favorite word as of right now! Ubuntu Dapper Drake has transformed my AMD K6-2 400Mhz machine into a more powerful webserver than I could have ever thought possible! Using XAMPP and eAccelerator to serve the pages quite speedily. It’s still not comparable to the new Mac Pro with 16GB of Fully Buffered DRAM, but hey it works for me.
If you’ve never tried Ubuntu, or any other Linux distro, I encourage you to download a LiveCD. This allows you to boot the kernel right off the CD and see what it looks and runs like. If you like enough, you can install it right then and there.
I will have to say, jumping into Linux was a bit scary at first, but as I do more in it, it becomes more familiar and I welcome the change. Finally constant disk activity has disappeared and now there is memory to spare. I just hope the hard disk doesn’t fail…
There’s a really cool AJAX homepage service called Netvibes. It is quite functional, and has a great amount of “modules” including things such as Custom RSS Feed modules, Flickr and Digg modules, Gmail module and much more! Coupled with that, you can add Meebo to one of the tabs, and have AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and Jabber/Gtalk inside of Netvibes. In my opinion, Meebo is a lot better than AIM Express.
On a different note, I hope to have a new server up and running before the end of the month, so if you visit and hate the fact that it takes 2 minutes to load the page, that hopefully will be fixed soon…
