Microwave Biscuit

According to the project schedule https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FeistyReleaseSchedule Feisty is going to go final in just a couple of weeks. I guess the big question is, when will I go Feisty? I have installed several of the Herd CD versions in virtual machines and I’ve had pretty good luck with them. However, those were “testing” machines and I didn’t care if it broke something. On my “main” machine I have quite a lot of stuff that I care about. Of course before I upgrade I will backup stuff to make sure that everything is safe but my real concern is for my entire configuration. I really like the present “state” of my system and I worry about the consequences of upgrading. My primary concerns are:

1. I already have the nVidia drivers installed and configured. How much effort will it take to re-do that after upgrade?
2. Beryl - as has been announced, Beryl and Compiz are rejoining and it seems that Feisty has Compiz enabled. What happens to my Beryl install?
3. How about the packages and software that I’ve installed that I’ve built from sources? Will I need to recompile and/or rebuild?

While I’m excited about the new release I’m definitely hesitant to upgrade on day 1.

In a recent post I mentioned a site that offers a “distribution chooser” which matches your needs and wants to a distribution. The top couple of choices that were geared towards me were Debian, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu. It’s not a surprise to me that those were the top choices but another distribution was also suggested which I haven’t used which is Ark Linux. I went to the website and poked around a bit. There’s not a whole lot to the website but I downloaded a copy and attempted to install it. I grabbed the current version (2006.1) and attempted to set it up in a VM (using VMWare). It did not go well. The install hung up a couple of times so I tried to do the install with acpi=no which did appear to work. One cool thing is that while the install is running, you can play a game (or two) of Tetris. Nice little touch. Anyway, after install, I went to reboot and it just dies. There’s a very pleasant boot screen but I can’t get it to boot up. I’ve tried a number of different boot parameters but basically it gets freaked out somewhere during drive detection and mounting and throws a kernel panic message followed by just sitting there. Here’s a screenshot of the message output:

Now, I don’t want to be too overly critical of Ark Linux as installs under VMWare can be tricky, however, I have never had such a “severe” problem with a distribution under VMWare. I did not download the Live CD, I got the actual install CD. I may get the Live CD just to see what it’s like and if I have better luck with it.

After today’s pickup from reddit and digg here are the final stats of the day:

Top WordPress Blogs of the day: #2
Top WordPress Posts of the day: #5
Fastest Growing WordPress Blogs: #1
Hits: 5256

Wow is all I can say.

My post on Ubuntu Feisty’s ‘command-not-found’ package got hit by reddit and digg. So far today my blog has gotten 1300+ hits. I normally average about 100 hits/day so it’s blowing up. I happened to peer at my blog stats and almost spit my coffee on the keyboard. As expected, I’m also in the fastest growing blogs of the day on WordPress (presently number 4). The blogoshpere is pretty crazy.