So, the new Ubuntu distro has made it’s debut, and I can say I’m pretty happy with what it has to offer. The upgrade this time was a much less invasive process, compared to 6.10 to 7.04. It only took me about a total of 5 hours of work to get the machine fully upgraded, re-configured, and functioning again. The only thing that is kind of daunting about upgrading, is the fact that the updater wants to replace a lot of the config files with their distributed default ones. If you choose to replace or keep, no data is lost, but it can be a real pain in the butt to track down what is going on when something isn’t working. Overall this time, i felt more confident in what the updater was doing/replacing, so I guess I wasn’t as nervous as last time. From a desktop user perspective, this new distribution has some things that make it a lot more user friendly. I can’t really comment too much on these things however, as of right now I’m only running it on my server. I have seen a little bit of a performance increase, my load has dropped a bit, but the cpu usage has gone up. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of the tickless kernel or not, but regardless, as long as the system is stable and performs well, I’m happy. I would recommend the upgrade for anyone who is thinking about it, and for the people who have yet to try Linux, now may be a great time to take the plunge into OSS.

Most “self-proclaimed gurus” have determined that the only real difference between 64-bit OS vs 32-bit OS is the amount of supported memory… This is the most obvious difference, however this is far from the only difference. I was catching up on my digging this morning, and I came across an article at bit-tech.net interesing article that discusses 64-bit processors. I can’t that I went into the article knowing everything about 64 bit vs. 32 bit, but it seems to be a bit clearer now. It will be interesting to see how 64 bit computing affects us, and how the OS developers embrace the new platform. YAY FOR MEGABITS!

Just saw a cute cartoon over at xkcd and wanted to share it. Engineers/Mathematics majors will get a kick out if it.

Coming soon to a computer near you! Try Linux today!

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