I’m sorry this notice is a day late. I didn’t catch it in my Inbox when it first came through–somehow it got filed away without me catching it. In any case, the second Alpha release of the upcoming “Lucid Lynx” release is now available for download. This is a perfect opportunity to fire up Virtualbox on Ubuntu 9.10 and give it a spin–help shape what will become the next flagship LTS (Long Term Supported) release!
Release announcement:
Welcome to Lucid Lynx Alpha 2, which will in time become Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Pre-releases of Lucid are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.
Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Lucid development cycle. The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Lucid. You can download it here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu)
http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu Server for UEC and EC2)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Ubuntu ARM)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Edubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/lucid/alpha-2/ (Mythbuntu)
See http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors for a list of mirrors.
Alpha 2 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. Please refer to http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/alpha2 for information on changes in Ubuntu.
This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs. For a list of known bugs (that you don’t need to report if you encounter), please see:
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/alpha2
If you’re interested in following the changes as we further develop Lucid, have a look at the lucid-changes mailing list:
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/lucid-changes
We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list if you’re interested in following Ubuntu development. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other
interesting events.
http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce
Bug reports should go to the Ubuntu bug tracker:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs
Enjoy!
If this article has been helpful, please consider linking to it.
I posted about a week ago that I’d begun working on a new theme for the site. I felt like it was time for something new–something a little less plain. I tried out a number of WordPress themes and layouts, and finally found one that I like. I feel it better represents where the site (and its author!) are at this point. Can you believe the site has been around for nearly four years! It is amazing–I can’t believe it myself sometimes.
I’d like to invite you to click through and have a look at the new site. Leave a comment. Let me know your thoughts.
Here is to a new year, a new look and new content!
I’m going to be working on this site to give it a new look and better organization for 2010. Please forgive the downtime / oddities for the rest of the day.
Today I want to formally announce the formation of my new company, Root Certified. This company was created in partnership with Aaron Toponce, aimed at providing expertly hosted applications and Linux consulting. Aaron and I have been good friends for years now. We’ve worked together as Linux Instructors and within the Linux community. We recently decided that we wanted to apply the knowledge and expertise that we have toward business, taking on new and exciting challenges. Our plan is to provide expert IT services to small and medium sized businesses.
Currently we’re offering a growing number of expertly managed hosted applications including:
Each of these hosted applications is built on a dedicated virtual server, at very affordable rates. We believe that too many hosting companies oversell their hardware and don’t provide the level of service many small businesses need. Our goal is to exceed clients expectations by providing a completely worry free service. We know each business has different needs, and those needs can’t always be met by turn-key cookie-cutter hosting solutions. We meet with each client to ensure that their needs are met, and we handle all the heavy lifting. All of our hosted applications and basic packages can be customized to provide each client with exactly the services they need.
I hope you’ll take a minute to check out what we have to offer. We’ll be announcing some other very exciting things very soon. Subscribe to the Root Certified Blog for all the latest news.
Thanks to some quick feedback and troubleshooting from the OpenID WP plugin developer I’ve got things functioning again. It seems we turned up a few issues that will still need addressing (primarily regarding my use of Lighttpd vs the more standard Apache), but we have things functional again.
Big thanks to Will for his help. If you’re not using OpenID on your WP blog, check out the plugin.
Also, of course, if you continue to run into any issues with OpenID here please let me know.
Based on much of the feedback in regards to my desire to blog about more than just Ubuntu I’d like to announce a secondary blog, blog.zelut.org. I’ve been using this site casually for the past few months, just for little things here and there, but I would like to try and focus now on expanding it to everything I’m working on. Currently it has a number of posts about FreeBSD, including installation and running services. I’ve started a section regarding Cisco, which I’m working with quite a bit now day to day. It also has other things mixed in here and there. I’m going to be spending some time migrating my scattered personal wiki notes onto that blog. Topics that you’ll likely see soon:
- Creating an RHN Satellite Server (without Red Hat Satellite) – CentOS
- Creating SSH Jails – CentOS
- Pinning Processes to Specific CPU – Linux
- DBAN (Darik’s Boot-and-Nuke) via PXE – CentOS
…and more.
I’ve added an RSS Feed to the new theme which will display the latest posts from this alternate site. You can find this in the upper-right corner of this blog. You may also want to add blog.zelut.org to your RSS reader and get a wider variety of information. I figure having two sites will be the best way to maintain a range of content while allowing for the reader to select what he does or does not want to read.
You’ll still be able to find Ubuntu related content here, and I’ll stick to that topic as closely as I can. For all your other Linux needs, I hope you find blog.zelut.org helpful.
Well it appears that the server migration is complete, and so far I am very happy with the results. First of all, I don’t think there was much downtime, if any at all. The only oddity that I encountered was regarding DNS propogation, and there is only so much you can do about that. Here is basically what I’ve setup:
- lighttpd + fastcgi + xcache : very efficient web server + virtual hosts
- bind9 : slave server (ns3)
- postfix + postgrey : mail relay (mx3)
- mysql + tuning-primer.sh : well tuned database backend
So far I am very impressed with the setup at linode. They have a really nice web management tool and they are very responsive to questions and support. The price is affordable as well–I hope the performance I’ve been seeing keeps up. So far all four processors sit idling the majoritiy of the day, and RAM sits at about 200M/360M total. That was unheard of with my previous setup using Apache, and I wasn’t running BIND previously either. I think I’m sold on lighttpd!
Please let me know if you encounter any oddities with the site. Thank you – Christer
I have a few minutes this evening after a full day at the hospital. My first child, a little girl, was born last nite. Everything went well and we’ve been getting used to the new addition in the hospital today. We’ll be back home tomorrow sometime, and I’m sure life will be a lot different.
I’ve just done an update of the database for this blog. I did an export and a giant find/replace for some formatting tags I wanted updated. If you notice anything really odd about the site, pages not displaying, content screwed up, etc please let me know.
It appears all is well.. so far.
What I did was go back and add the code tag to all of the blockquotes, which shoud clean up a bit of the formatting. This should help avoid things like reformatting of dash-dash, etc.
I spent yesterday evening putting the final touches on my server transition. The DNS update should be making its way through the ever clogging interweb tubes as you read this. Hopefully by Monday it’ll have made its way to the far corners of the interweb.
I do want to thank everyone that offered services and advice. There were a number of people that stepped up and offered discounted or even free hosting for this blog, and I really do appreciate those offers. In the end the server ended up on SliceHost running a xen Ubuntu 7.10 image. (I actually bought the SliceHost image about a month ago and, due to the holidays, had been unable to get everything migrated.) I’m glad to hear the good remarks in SliceHost’s favor. I hope I am as satisfied as the rest of you.
New Server Stats:
Information from /proc/cpuinfo shows four listings for “Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2212 HE”, which I’m sure is shared with a number of other “slices”. I have 256M RAM dedicated to my “slice” and it is running Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy” Server. To help maintain a healthy speed I’m running the latest WP-Super-Cache plugin for WordPress and memcached underneath. I hope this new setup can withstand Digg and its minions.
Thoughts About the Old Host:
Having been with BlueHost for about nine-months I think I learned a few things about bulk-hosting companies and more specifically about my needs as a webmaster. For your everyday site I’m sure BlueHost is more than adequate. I have nearly a dozen other sites and blogs that I maintain, all (previously) hosted there, which have seen minimal issues. This site however is a different story. As the number of active Ubuntu users continues to rise the load on this site gets heavier and heavier. In its earlier days this site was not a threat to any host, but as it has matured I’m sure there are many hosts that would tremble at the thought.
I’m sad to say that I’m really disappointed in the way that BlueHost handled the load issues. It isn’t an uncommon practice for hosting providers to temporarily suspend a site with a high load, but I think it is a bad practice. I think a better solution would be to contact the site owner and notify them of the server load. Offer to keep the site online and available (when it really is needed most!), perhaps for a small additional fee worked into the contract. When a hosting provider takes down a site under a heavy load all they are doing is making both parties look incompetent. If BlueHost had gone the extra mile with my server load vs suspending the site and making it unavailable I would be singing a different tune now altogether. Praises vs grief.
It’s water under the bridge now and we’ve moved on. Here is to 2008 and (hopefully) a very accessible, very active Ubuntu Tutorials blog!