I love taking things apart to see how they work. Those around me see sharp edges, exposed wires and danger, while I see evolution, improvement and opportunities to learn. Imagine my excitement disappointment when my 3+ year old laptop’s screen failed – it finally became two screens when five columns of pixels gave up, creating a new and exciting 30:70 spit visual experience.

Within a few days I had the screwdrivers out, removed the lcd panel and ordered a replacement. To be honest, I almost fainted when I actually repaired it. Feeling highly motivated, I decided to tackle the Operating System, which had been running very slowly for many months. A quick visit to ubuntu.com provided the install image for ubuntu 9.04 and thirty minutes later I had a brand new laptop. I’m really very impressed with Ubuntu, the install process was a breeze and with the exception of a minor sound issue everything just works.

I’ve been writing a hand-on lab for the upcoming Share.org conference and need to supply a source code repository for use in the lab. After a little pondering, the following neat solution came to me:

1. Boot ubuntu on a laptop using a live-distro CD
2. Insert a memory stick containing an install script, a cvspserver file and the source to be added to the repository
3. Run the install script to dynamically install and configure CVS and check-in the source code
4. Run ifconfig to get the IP address of the laptop and supply this to the lab attendees along with the CVS connection details

The install script (install.sh) contains commands extracted from this page and executes them in turn.

It looks like this:

sudo apt-get install cvs
sudo apt-get install xinetd
sudo cvs -d /var/lib/cvs init
sudo cp cvspserver /etc/xinetd.d/cvspserver
sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart
sudo chmod -R a+rw /var/lib/cvs
cd project
cvs -d :pserver:ubuntu@localhost:/var/lib/cvs import -m “Importing my project to CVS repository” . new_project start

I now have a fully configured CVS server that can be disposed of at the end of the lab.

After weeks of bullying from my pod mate Russell, followed by a great  two pronged sales job from Scott and Dan, I thought I should at least have a look at the new version  of Ubuntu.

So armed with Russ’ 8.10 CD I gave it a whirl, booting from the CD without installing it properly. I tried it first on my old T42 Thinkpad and it was up and running without any intervention. OK, I’m partially impressed.

Now the real test, would it cope with my 5 year old Evesham desktop?

Simple – it went on a treat, recognised all the bits (external harddrive, wired internet) – I’m now very impressed.

Plan is to buy a Mac in the new year and then turn the Windows box into Ubuntu. My daughter is not impressed as Linux doesn’t have MSN (at least that’s what I’m telling her – and will keep it like that as I think MSN has been responsible for 90% of the viruses on our box)

So count me as a new Ubuntu fan…..

Happy Christmas to both our reader. See you all again in 2009