I recently read that Ubuntu 7.04 “Fiesty Fawn” has been announced for release in 2007, and it got me thinking… what is the deal with the version numbers Ubuntu has gone through? For some background, here’s the list:

• 4.10 Warty Warthog
• 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog
• 5.10 Breezy Badger
• 6.06 Dapper Drake
• 6.10 Edgy Eft
• 7.04 Fiesty Fawn (planned)

I already knew that Ubuntu has weird animal names for their development releases, but the numbering scheme was a little strange to me. A quick pop over to the Ubuntu FAQ page showed this:

Ahhh, that makes so much more sense now. So 6.10 was released on 06/2006, and that’s the reason for the number scheme.

I’ve blogged before about my upgrade of Dapper to the beta of Edgy Eft. I’ve been running the beta Edgy for a few weeks now without any noticable problems.

Yesterday the release version of Edgy Eft was announced, so I’ve decided to upgrade my beta version to the full version. I’m excited to also get the full version of Firefox 2 along with the upgrade.

We start out by launching the Software Updates tool by clicking the little red icon next to the clock. Most likely you’ve already seen the popup saying that there are new updates.

Wow, 79 updates… that’s gonna take a while to download.

If you encountered a message saying that not all the packages could be downloaded, you can just continue, and then it will scan for updates again and give you another chance to download and install the missing packages. Just make sure you don’t reboot in the middle if you do it that way. Otherwise, you can cancel the install and restart the install process.

An hour later, we’ve finally got Ubuntu upgraded to the full version of Edgy. After a reboot, we can check to make sure that we are running the full version by running this command at the terminal prompt:

> cat /etc/issue

Ubuntu 6.10 \n \l

If we take a look at the Firefox About screen, we’re on version 2.0. I noticed that it kept my profile intact as well, which is good.

Edgy also comes with a new “personal wiki” tool, that works somewhat like notepad with hyperlinks between notes… pretty cool. I noticed that a menu item didn’t appear for it after install, so I just launched it from a terminal prompt with “tomboy &”.

Enjoy your new fully released Ubuntu Edgy Eft installation!

I use VMware to run Ubuntu on my work laptop, and I’ve gotten to the point where I use Ubuntu on a daily basis for development, testing, and browsing the net without fear of spyware or viruses. VMware runs so fast that when I use fullscreen mode I don’t even notice I’m running it in a virtual machine.

As a relatively new Ubuntu user, one of the fears when upgrading my machine to beta software is that I’m going to be left with an unusable system. Only recently have I started using the Snapshot feature that has existed for quite a while in VMware, and I finally found a great use for it.

I had a working, tweaked and customized Ubuntu Dapper install, but I really wanted to try out Edgy… so I fired up the Snapshot \ Take Snapshot tool and typed in a descriptive snapshot name:

My Edgy install went great, had no problems with it. The VMware tools even continued to work, which was the main thing I was worried about.

The snapshot manager is a beautiful thing… you can see the different snapshots that you have taken, and even a mini screenshot of the system at the exact time you took the snapshot.

So now I’ve started using the Snapshot feature on a regular basis, whenever I’m about to do a large upgrade. The only drawback is a little performance hit, and some extra drive space used. Of course, you can delete the snapshots once you’ve finished upgrading, and retrieve that space.

I decided over the weekend that I wanted to try out the latest beta of Ubuntu on my test box. Since I’m not running anything critical on there apart from a test copy of my blog, I figured it was safe to upgrade.

I checked out the official upgrade page which told me I can use the Update Manager, which is the graphical tool built into Ubuntu. I’m a command-line guy, but I figured I’d try it… all you have to do is start the app with this line:

gksu “update-manager -c -d”

Now that is simple. It launched the dialog, I clicked the Install Updates button, and it did everything else for me.

Wow that was easy. They sure are making Ubuntu user-friendly.

Note: Don’t try this if you are running Ubuntu as a VMWare Guest. Doesn’t work so well there. I’ll post something once I figure that out.

I’ve been using subversion from the command line lately, so I posted a new quick reference guide for Subversion. As usual, it contains just the basic commands that you would need to interact with a Subversion repository. This is useful for the casual developer, or even somebody like me that just can’t always remember the commands. Enjoy!

Also, I’ve been slacking off a bit lately on posting… but I’ve got a couple of new changes to the site to mention. I re-did the theme entirely because I was having too many problems getting it working in different browsers. Royal pain, that was! It turns out the Google ads at the top of the screen were making the site not display correctly in IE, so I just dropped them… I doubt they were doing any good anyway. I also figured out that the site isn’t working in Opera, but I have a fix for that.

I originally posted the Rails Quick Reference because I thought it could help some other people as well… but now I’ve realized that the person it helps the most is me. I’ve found myself consulting it more and more, so I decided to start creating quick reference guides for everything I work on.

There’s now a very basic Ubuntu Quick Reference guide that only contains a couple of items, but I still posted it because it’s a shell for me to improve.

I’ve also posted a Vim Quick Reference guide. Before you tell me, I know there are a ton of these guides out there on the net, but I wanted just the commands I need to use frequently, not a full guide to everything.

Enjoy!

I’ve read all over the place that the latest version of VMWare supports Ubuntu directly, but it still doesn’t seem to work. I still get the error message that there is not a compiled version of the tools suitable for my system. Here’s the steps I took to allow the tools to compile:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

That was pretty much it. Once I had run those two commands, I was able to install the VMWare tools without a hitch.

Today, I’ve decided that my old linux box at home really could use an upgrade. I’m currently running Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary) on it, but I’ve decided to upgrade it to the latest stable version. Of course, I’m sitting at work, connecting into my home network via ssh like normal. Do I really have to go home and pop the cd in the box in order to upgrade? Just how do you upgrade an Ubuntu box anyway?

So, after doing a very brief google search, I’ve discovered that all you have to do to upgrade from one major version to another, is use the same built-in package system you normally use. Pretty cool… but does it work? Since all my data is on the second hard drive, I’m gonna go for it.

(Continued)