Ubuntu and Passenger has Just Married

My gosh, I can’t believe I missed this. On May 21 Brightbox has announced a happy marriage of a revolutionary mod_rails (Passenger) project from Phusion to the excellent user-friendly Linux for the mere mortals — Ubuntu.

It means that the deployment and management of Rails applications becomes a breeze. I personally still prefer my very custom deployment setup — Nginx-Mongrel (for Rails) + Nginx-Apache (for PHP), but for those planning to unroll massive Rails hosting, it may be a famous Red Pill.

Love Rails!

Ubuntu 8.04 is Out

It was Clean Thursday yesterday and hopefully you were cleaning your hard drive for a great new Ubuntu 8.04. It made it to the download sites in the evening and since then they creak under a heaviest load.

Have you ever wondered why they version their releases in that strange way — …, 7.04, 7.10, 8.04? I never mulled over that, but yesterday I was enlightened. Look at the numbers closely: 2007.04, 2007.10, 2008.04. Alright, now it does make perfect sense, doesn’t it?

While we are at it, let me explain briefly how I partition my hard drive to aid quick and painless system upgrades. Keeping in mind that Canonical releases a new version precisely once a half year, it is judicious to keep OS on a separate partition so that it can be easily replaced, while your home directories stay intact. This is how I do it:

• / (root) partition — 5 Gb
• /home partition — 5 Gb
• swap partition — 2 Gb

Every time a new version of Ubuntu comes out, I simply format the root partition and install the release there from a Live CD. Certainly I need to restore all apps later, but it’s not a big deal actually as I maintain a nice list for this matter.

I know Ubuntu has a mechanism to upgrade itself to a newer version through the Updates manager, but, in practice, being upgraded in this fashion, OS doesn’t unveil its full potential, and more like “mimics” the previous version. I compared the two in the past and am inexpressibly happy about the discovery.

Hopefully this information will be valuable in the light of upcoming wave of upgrades.

Ubuntu 8.04 is Coming

You know, I’m a big fan of Ubuntu Linux and using it on my aging HP compaq nx9005 laptop for my business needs just fine for more than 5 years now. I’ve been running it since its childhood and my drawers are still full of Live CDs they generously send to everyone free of charge.

Today, when I was looking for an updated Pidgin 2.4.1 package (currently I’m running 2.2.0), I happened to see the front page of the official Ubuntu site and guess what? It struck me on the head. 16 days left until the next release!

It made my day. I’m well-taught that every next release takes so much enjoyment that it would be fair to make it an official world-wide holiday. No kidding. It is much like every next Mac OS X version, but without an additional weight. You still can run the OS on your granny’s i386, and do that comfortably. But if you have an up-to-date roaring monster under the hood, there’s a plenty of options to keep it busy.

Enough words. Let’s count out loud.