I don't know how many times I've seen people writing articles about Linux not being "ready for the desktop" and just wanted to bury my face in the palm of my hand. It's certainly ready for my desktop, it's ready for my father's desktop, my grandmother's desktop, your desktop too.

So when I read this "review" of Windows by an old associate from my Automatix days, I had a bit of a laugh, because this one is actually quite true. Go read it and get an idea what you'd have to go through if your laptop/desktop didn't come with any OS pre-installed and you had to install Windows yourself. And while you're at it, Digg it.

Today I found out that you could directly upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake to 8.04. I know, I know... that should have been obvious given that they're both Long-Term Support releases. Anyway, moving right along... the instructions were found here and overall the whole process was very simple besides being constantly asked if I wanted to replace old config files with the newer versions. Looks like my concerns in this post were mostly moot, so far, no problems! *knock on wood*

Disclosure: I am a former member of the Automatix development team and primary web designer responsible for their web presence. Well, that was then, anyway.

While reading an old acquaintance's blog, I discovered what I feel should have happened a long time ago. The Automatix project is finally over, at least in it's current form. The official announcement says the remaining developers no longer have time to remain committed to the project, but I can't help but feel that they finally realized that their work is irrelevant, for all the reasons Iandefor listed. I certainly realized it, and so did most of the rest of the dev team, who left the project not long after I did. I won't get into all the politics that have gone on both behind the scenes and publicly in regards to Automatix. Most of it was petty anyway. I'm glad that they finally saw reason and decided to focus their resources on bigger and better things.

I setup Lighttpd 1.4.18 with FastCGI support for PHP on my development server last night just to see if it's gotten any better since I last tried it. So far so good, at least setup and install went much better this time. Ubuntu has had Lighttpd in the repos since Dapper (although only Gutsy and Hardy are up to date.) Setting up FastCGI was easy this time around, I didn't get any server errors at all, although it's possible I only owe this to better understanding of the documentation. Just for kicks, I also installed eAccelerator, which is a PHP op-code cache that I've been using on my primary server for a few months along with some other performance tweaks (mostly various types of caching.)

Those that follow Linux news will certainly know that Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" is coming at the end of April. This release is a major milestone for Ubuntu, because it's the second Long Term Support (LTS) release, after 6.06 "Dapper Drake". That means they'll be keeping it up to date for 18 months as normal, but will provide security updates for 3 years on desktop installations and 5 years for servers.

For those wondering, yes, I do host my website on my own server and it is running Dapper. Previously I had made up my mind that I was going to continue using Dapper for the duration of it's support cycle mostly because it is proven and stable but also because it's a major hassle to upgrade. I'm reconsidering this for a number of reasons, but the main one is simply because I enjoy being on the bleeding edge, and a lot of things on my Dapper server are very out of date and won't ever be updated unless I can find backports, or compile programs myself, neither of which I want to do.