Back from Sin City. ApacheCon was interesting, definitely a much smaller operation than even mid-size shows like MySQL Conference, OSCON. The talks I attended were very informative (as was mine, I hope, a bit of a rehash of a classic Mono presentation with a lot of ASP and ASP.NET information mixed in with migration tricks).

The hotel however was Ghettolicious and the large signs, humorously posted by the conference team saying “This site is under construction”, never more appropriate.

All in all a good week with many attendees curious about Mono and NLD, including a Ferengi who was after my limited edition gold plated NLD box set:

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He’s not really dead. As long as we remember him.

I met Ubuntu people at ApacheCon and chatting with them made me want to install their desktop and try it out. Also, many of my colleagues are blogging about Ubuntu so I wanted to try it out. This anecdote is not at all a comment on the quality of the product nor pretends to be a review of it but is just that, an anecdote.

My PC at home was sick with a bad case of Windows and I thought I’d install Ubuntu on there, especially since the hardware is horribly complicated with a state of the art (then) Abit AT7 (with Firewire on board, USB 2.0, Compact Flash readers, HPT 374 Software RAID, maybe the first motherboard to feature all of this). I wanted a state of the art distro with the latest of everything so that I wouldn’t have to hunt for device drivers.

And yes, while the Ubuntu installer was very simple, I was puzzled by the choice of 4 kernels (which to chose and why ?) and the fact that while everything seems to go well, the box kernel panicked early in the boot process. I didn’t have much time to debug (beyond trying one of the three other kernel choice available to me) so I tried to install NLD instead. And it worked. Pfft.

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