Ubuntu Edgy Eft was released on Thursday, and today I thought I would check it out. To sum it up: I'm impressed.
The hardware detection was immaculate. The only thing that I had an issue was the bcm43xx driver for my wireless card. This was using the reverse-engineered driver and the only reason that it didn't work was because it didn't have the firmware (which they're not allowed to redistribute)- so I just copied the firmware from /lib/firmware on the hard drive to the ramdisk, restarted the module and bingo- it worked! I haven't been able to get this working on my Debian installation yet, but I'd prefer to use ndiswrapper than not having wireless- so to be honest, I haven't tried that much! My preferred resolution (1600x1200) was activated immediately and I was even able to download and install apps from universe and they ran perfectly too! The thing that is hard to compete with is the simplicity- everything was just so easy for everyone!
I am very impressed and the Ubuntu team have done a great job! This really will be the start-point for more people using Linux. Although I'm not going to jump to start using Ubuntu now, I will certainly consider dual-booting it with Debian next time I re-install Debian.
I went to LinuxWorld Expo on Wednesday. It was really interesting and I enjoyed it, although I did spend a little too much time there. The emDebian stand was interesting and I chatted about HTC phones running Linux for a while. The Hula stand showed me a nice installation of Hula. I was impressed with this and have tried getting it working on my server, failing so far on the fact that I need to use apache2 and this is broken at the moment. There were other interesting stands, but you know 'em. I listened to Jono Bacon's talk on Ubuntu in the community, or something like that. It was alright, but a little tedious as I already knew about Ubuntu! In fact, this week has made me appreciate Ubuntu a lot more. Another thing that I thought was interesting at the expo was the fact that some stands had people who didn't really know much about the project, or direct competitors, which was a little odd. An amusing thing was the corporate stands- as soon as they saw I was representing no company they realised I must be a student and promptly ignored me! I got several bits of free stuff, including:
CakePHP is the best thing I have come across for a very long time! I had previously looked at it but wasn't quite interested. But I had a look at the Ruby on Rails screencasts. And after hearing that Cake was the Ruby on Rails of PHP. I am learning it right now, and am loving it- all hail MVC!
Also- today was my Total Dvorak day, and my brain hurts!
On the second of my servers I had a nice installation of Apache 2.0, PHP 5, modpython multi-project Trac, Subversion with modsvn and SSL; and I liked it! However, yesterday I did a little upgrade of Trac (to 0.10) and it upgraded some other stuff leaving Apache2 broken. Instead of bothering to work out what was wrong I saw this as an ideal chance to try out lighttpd. So I removed apache and all its mods and installed lighttpd. After a bit of config problems with Python I have now set up:
- lighttpd 1.4.13: At the time being the configuration files are a little horrible and I need to separate lighttpd.conf into parts for virtual servers, but it works.
- FastCGI: This required no effort, but the fact that I'm using it feels nice.
- PHP 5.1.6: This worked nicely straight away following instructions from the informative lighttpd wiki.
- Trac 0.10: This is working as a nice multi-project installation, except authentication currently does not work..
- MoinMoin 1.5.3: After much messing around, I finally got this working as a single wiki installation. I would however prefer this as a wikifarm kind of install..
So this leaves me with much todo:
- Sort out lighttpd config files.
- Sort out Trac authentication across multiple projects.
- Install Subversion support.
- Add SSL support for svn.
- Add support for a MoinMoin wiki farm!
I have learned about lighttpd, MoinMoin and FastCGI though, so
all isn't lost, even though it isn't totally working yet. Anyway,
it feels like food time and I can smell bread rolls! 
A few things to ponder over:
- This new theme for Wordpress is lovely! I edited it a little to remove the left sidebar, add the description to directly under the header and to remove all tag support. I love it!
- My UCAS form is totally complete and now out of my life. Well, I lie- I still need to decide what college to apply to at Durham- any suggestions?!
- Half term is coming up and a few things on the card: Linuxworld Expo (yay) and visiting people...
- I watched Revolution OS which was a bit of a laugh to listen to Stallman, Perens, Eric Raymond, etc. but was informative at the same time! Pointed out my ignorance of the actual roots of the GNU project.
- Funny- my sixth form tutor is learning LaTeX!
- Got the Old Dispensary Concert after half term in which I've playing the first movement of Brandenburg 4 and Meditation from Thais by Massenet- I should really do some practice soon.
- Oh, and on the music front- the House Music Competition is this Thursday! It is bound to be a laugh with School House singing Feeling Good, a version by Michael Buble, in the ensemble; and as a whole house singing "Masachism Tango" by Tom Lehrer!
That is all, for now.