Bit Matrix

I don’t often complain about the state of some OSS projects understanding that it is all part of the growth process. However, every once in a while a new version of our favorite product ends up being worse than the outgoing. My personal experience with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is one such occurence. I upgraded my 8.04 install to 8.10 as soon as it came out. Whereas 8.04 was rock solid and functional (it is a LTS release after all) 8.10 is proving anything but. For the record, the aforementioned copy of Ubuntu is running on a T61 Thinkpad with NVidia graphics and Intel Wireless (pretty standard hardware).

Update: I recently updated the T61 to Ubuntu 9.04 and all of the problems mentioned below have disappeared. So, thumbs-up to canonical and all the OSS contributors involved in this (and any) distribution.

Update: Ubuntu 9.10 runs even better than 9.04 including a boot speedup from 1:35 down to 45 seconds!
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Linux 8.10, intrepid ibex, Linux, Ubuntu

I recently needed to install PHP 5.2 on CentOS 5.3. This version of CentOS comes with PHP 5.1 but, in order to run phpMyAdmin, I needed 5.2. The CentOS software repositories are, unfortunately, still stuck with 5.1 and the only way to get a newer version of PHP installed via the package manager (yum) is to add another repository that has a newer version. Read more…

Linux, Technical apache, centos, centos 5, Linux, memcache, pecl, php, php 5.2, yum