So, not too long ago, I upgraded from Ubuntu 09.10 to 10.04 – and I’m glad I did.

Quick Overview

From the very start, 10.04 looked sleeker, worked faster, and the basic pack­age installed sev­eral use­ful appli­ca­tions to make the user expe­ri­ence excit­ing. Lucid Lynx (10.04) improved sev­eral fea­tures from Jaunty Jack­a­lope (09.10) – the soft­ware cen­ter is sim­pler, it installed the upgraded ver­sion of OpenOf­fice, and over­all the sys­tem seems more balanced.

Improv­ing 10.04

I dis­cov­ered a SIMPLE and EFFECTIVE way to con­nect to our web servers the other day and I almost feel a lit­tle dumb for not dis­cov­er­ing it ear­lier. Per­haps this is even avail­able in Win­dows and I’ve never noticed…

Some­time ago when I upgraded to the BETA ver­sion of Ubuntu 9.10 my FTP client stopped work­ing. For what­ever rea­son it would trans­fer a few files then sud­denly freeze up. I would close my FTP client and try it again only to expe­ri­ence the same result. I deduced this issue was a Ubuntu 9.10 issue as I would have sim­i­lar results with sev­eral dif­fer­ent FTP clients.

As you may have read in a pre­vi­ous post I was unsuc­cess­ful in get­ting Adobe Cre­ative Suite 3 to install via WINE or CROSSOVER (CS4 wouldn’t install either). So, at the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend I installed VMware Work­sta­tion 6.5… I was pretty impressed. It installed Win­dows XP PRO SP3 with­out a sin­gle hic­cup, it val­i­dated with Microsoft, updated just fine… I installed Adobe Cre­ative Suite 4 with­out any trou­ble and it also val­i­dated just fine…

The evo­lu­tion of Linux has inspired peo­ple like myself to give it a try – and per­haps like a strong nar­cotic – now I’m hooked. Dis­cussing Linux is far more com­pli­cated than many in the com­put­ing world want to rec­og­nize and the rea­son for this com­plex­ity stem from Linux’s her­itage as a secure and sta­ble enter­prise server oper­at­ing sys­tem. The truth is most peo­ple don’t need an enter­prise server oper­at­ing sys­tem and they cer­tainly don’t need the tra­di­tional com­plex­i­ties asso­ci­ated with them. So, when I talk about Linux’ evo­lu­tion I’m talk­ing about it from a gen­eral user stand­point, not a server admin­is­tra­tor want­ing to play with it on my every­day workstation.