Tuesday, July 24, 2007

general desktop and server news

well, it's been a while....

Dumped PCBSD as a desktop because after several upgrades I realized I was really only running FreeBSD with KDE on top. I wasn't using any PCBSD "benefits" and a somethings had gone screwy with the upgrades - particularly the Xorg updates that were broken along the way.

I also realized that I just didn't want to spend time configuring and playing with distros....this occurred to me because I attempted ArchLinux because it looked to be perfect for me....optimized for 686, and oriented much like BSD. However, it took some thought and maintenance to keep going.....so I abandoned that.

My requirements are few....firefox, python, and a shell. Add on top of that vmware server because I wanted to abandon the separate server and use just one machine. Has to be fast and light.....my desktop has a mere 8MB on board video RAM. Enter fluxbuntu.

I ran fluxbuntu for a while....it's quick and already has my fundamental requirements save for vmware, but that was pretty easy to install. However FB was based on dapper and the subversion client for dapper was too old for my repo. Two months into FB I decided to try the upgrade to Feisty and it failed in various ways. FB also had some annoying issues. There was supposed to be a Feisty release of it but that didn't happen. They are anticipating a Gusty release....maybe I'll try that.

For now I'm on Xubuntu, with vmware running my server. Having the server on vmware makes for simple backups of the entire vmware images onto dvd.