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.
So just browsing digg, and found an interesting article about a fellow Ubuntu user.
“After a rather fine night out on the town, I came home in a rather inebriated state. Put the live disc in, and recklessly choose to install Ubuntu, and did so by wiping the entire hard drive (previously XP). This sort of switch has sortof thrown me in at the deep end, but I have no regrets and has to be one of the best drunken decisions I have ever taken…”
Ubuntu: It’s so easy to install, you can do it when you’re three sheets to the wind. Just goes to show how easy the install for Ubuntu really is.
On a completely different note, there’s a browser based MMO, called Travian, that I’ve been playing, and its pretty dang cool. Maybe some of you remember playing “Kings of Chaos” and “Dark Throne”, well this game is similar, but it beats the pants off of both of them. It’s a good way to be able to passively game, while not spending more than an 15 minutes to an half-hour a day playing. Of course you could play it more, but there is only so much you can do at the “passive pace” the game plays at. If you do decide to play, I’m on Server 2 in the South-East area.
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…
