Isolationism

I apologise for a quiet couple of days here on the blog; I’ve been busy doing a bit of maintenance on my desktops.

While I was eventually successful in upgrading Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft, I experienced frequent lock-ups for no good reason (while the machine was doing literally nothing more than playing music in Amarok). It goes without saying that if an OS can’t be trusted to play an mp3, I don’t want to depend on it for anything more important (which is just about everything).

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A recent article on Digg.com suggests that a number of Ubuntu users are experiencing difficulties upgrading from Dapper Drake to the recently released Edgy Eft.

I took the plunge myself yesterday, and spent a hair-pulling day coaxing Ubuntu to install all the packages by apt-get, then by the GUI upgrade tool (several times), then by apt-get again. Eventually, after a number of tries (including one user-aborted attempt because of ridiculously slow downloads and several installation failure aborts), apt-get didn’t want to install anything else and I rebooted and—gratifyingly—everything came up fine, and all the upgrades appear to be present.

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Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical Ltd. (the creators of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution) posted on his blog today that he feels that skin-deep beauty is what Ubuntu desperately needs right now (before rambling on about something a little less to-the-point—maybe it sounds better when you hear it in from him in person).

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…or:

Why I Won’t Be Buying Vista Or Any Software From Microsoft Ever Again

I’ve had a frustrating couple of days trying to get my old copy of Windows XP up and running inside the free VMWare Player package using Ubuntu as the host operating system; getting the player up and running was easy; I just marked the package for installation in Synaptic and a couple minutes later it was ready to run.

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