Good Karma...

I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu this evening. Version 9.10 is known as the "Karmic Koala". I have been running "Hardy Heron" for quite a while and whilst I am generally happy with it, there have been a couple of things that bothered me. Moreover, there are new versions of Firefox and OpenOffice.org which I am definitely interested in.

The new version looks much slicker and loads very quickly indeed, so I will definitely upgrade.

Upgrading won't be a trivial task though as I will have to reinstall quite a lot of software. The list includes: Apache, MySQL, PHP, Thunderbird, Bluefish, Subversion and GPass amongst others. Ubuntu's package manager makes software installation nice and easy. My broadband connection will be busy tomorrow morning!

I have good quality backups of my data, having installed BackupPC on my "server", which is actually another PC running as an ubuntu workstation with Apache, MySQL, PHP and Subversion. For added belts and braces, I have added all of the websites that have been under development to my Subversion repository. This is in addition to the BackupPC backups!

When I pluck up the courage, the desktop edition on this machine will be replaced with a server edition.

I think tomorrow will be an interesting day - hopefully it won't be too "interesting"!

The other thing that piqued my interest today was the Zend framework for developing web applications. This and other development frameworks look very exciting and I will be doing quite a bit of research on Zend and other frameworks before I make a start on coding my next project.