As many of you may have seen by now, Ubuntu 7.10 - a.k.a. the Gutsy Gibbon has been released into the wild.

I’ve switched web hosts more times than I care to admit at this point, and I can tell you that by far the most painful part of the move is getting everything set up before you move the DNS over to the new server.

One very simple trick that I have used the past few times I have switched is to hijack your local machine’s ‘host’ file, allowing you to temporarily ignore what the DNS servers of the world-wide-tubes are telling you.

Riyad Kalla over at the Break It Down Blog has pointed out that there is an xorg.conf GUI control panel coming in Ubuntu 7.10.

For the most part, I feel this is a major step in the right direction. Editing the xorg.conf file by hand is a dangerous task for anyone who doesn’t truly know what they are doing. The behavior of X in the face of a malformed or just generally borked configuration file isn’t always stellar.

The first release-candidate of the 2.6.22 Linux kernel has been released into the wild. 2.6.22 at first glance seems to be an ‘everything but the kitchen sink release’, as according to Linus:

The diffstat and shortlogs are way too big to fit under the kernel mailing list limits, and the changes are all over the place. Almost seven thousand files changed, and that’s not double-counting the files that got moved around.

Later in the mailing-list mail he discusses some high level indicators of what has changed (see above for the link). For those curious, here is, I believe, the full change-log - and it is certainly a doozie.

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…Gutsy Gibbon.

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Ubuntu 7.04, aka ‘Feisty Fawn’ was released today, and it looks like interest in the new release is once again greater than the last. Ubuntu’s Drupal powered site unfortunately bit-the-big-one for several hours today (or as Mark Shuttleworth was quoted in the linked article, became ‘logjammed’).

Hopefully the loss of liveliness was network related, and not related to some Drupal scalability issue; one may never know :)

Recently, I’ve started to notice a proliferation of companies selling computers (laptops mostly) with Ubuntu preinstalled.

One of the most talked-about (and mature if the word can be used in this case) is System76 who has the dual resume of not only selling Ubuntu-powered laptops, but also selling laptops that are classy looking, and are “reasonable” configurations for the average non-gamer.

Their current Darter offering is a plenty-powerful setup in a very pretty package: