i opted to update my home systems this weekend, ubuntu for my x86 box and tiger for my mac. in preperation, i bought a new firewire disk for backs and the like. the backup process took the most time, overall, but is well worth the time spent.

having received my *free* shipit cd's the same day that i unfortunately obtained a couple of cds after attending linux world i was chock full of install disks.

on the mac side of the desk i picked up a fresh tiger cd and opted to add ilife '05 to the mix.

with the backups safely offlined i dug in w/ the upgrades opting to give them a go concurrently, at least to start out. the ubuntu install process was quite fresh and in fact the overall time to get a login for each system was identical, noting that the requisite linux system pimp'age was still needed.

i'm really impressed with the ubuntu install process. the few prompts that were present we're extremely intuitive short the disk partitioning. even that process was a joy in comparison to some distributions. both of my internal disks were picked up. a swap partition was not called out which struck me as odd having *once* suffered a ill configured system with too little swap. i opted to specify /swap and moved on.

going with ubuntu is a coming home distribution for me as my first home linux system was debian dressed with enlightenment ... mmmmmm, great eye candy for sure.

this go around, though, gnome decked with my choice of swag jewelrey filled 'da bill.

once i got back to my day-to-day with the system i tried to su root only to be kicked to the curb. after frantically trying to remember the install prompts specifying a root password ... think think think ... and realizing that no such prompt was offered i opted to sudo, ahhh, joy! sudo is on by default and you can't, by default, su root. now that is just the way it should be and i was quite happy to not have to vi /etc/sudoers as a post-install process. this is not unlike osx, from an end users perspective. that being that (at least) one user is specified as a systems administrator.

the default programs were quite fresh, which was nice. i opted to pull down a new firefox and thunderbird and was really impressed with the new extensions and themes since i have last installed these tools. the "smooth scroll" extension is gold.

i was really happy to find the synaptic package manager, a sweet apt-get front end. what a joy that tool is too use. i really missed a tool like that when migrating off of debian a couple of years back. after adding some extended repositories to apt i stumbled upon bum, boot-up manager. this is a must have for service management. i also got a chance to install ethereal via a managed process which for reasons unknown was a pain in the a$$ on my former system. using ethereal for my day-to-day will be nice when i finally get a chance to try out the nice "ethereal jxta protocol analyzer" swag my colleague bondolo has cooked up.

i fought a bit with alsa to get my system utter sounds. i'm still grappling with nvidia driver support with the bar being a smooth playing game of bzflag with my son. i suspect this won't be too difficult to get in oder once i dig in.

i familiarized myself a bit with the x.org system, swapping my cntrl-and-caps keys and going big with 1280x1024 resolution. easy enough and ample resources abound.

all in all i'm quite impressed. great/free, literally free cd(s) & shipping, distribution. very smooth process. comprehensive forums, wikis, etc. the ubuntu community should be proud!

osx/tiger is great. dashboard is something my wife is sure to like. the updated iPhoto is something we had a great time with during the evening viewing old photos with new querying capabilities ... finding some we are going to photoshop a bit and and hang them on the wall.

the only downside to this systems upgrade weekend was that during the installs i opted to clean the mac keyboard. i was happy to find that it cleans up nicely, in comparison to the typical pc keyboard. the trouble was that i rushed a bit during the process and failed to ring out the paper towel thoroughly and ended up shorting out a couple of keys, namely escape, up-arrow and 4. i gave it another day to dry out to no avail so i chalked this one up to lessons learned and pennied up for a new keyboard.

all in all my home systems are singing away nicely.

i ended up updating my work system early on in the week and pretty much liked the results as well being greeted with a smooth gnome theme. i hope to get a desktop solaris 10 system under my mits soon.

i scored a couple of new cds this weekend as well. the crystal method, community service ii cd so rocks! this is a must have cd.

rock on!

MyJXTA :: use it - learn it - do it

Java == platform independence
XML == application independence
JXTA == network independence

Secure End-to-End Computing

in my ears: The Crystal Method/Community Service II/1979 (New Originals 1799 Remix)