LinuxJedi's /dev/null

There were a few things that annoyed me with Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago, yes I was using Hardy, but I think I would feel the same if using Gutsy (Gutsy is PITA to setup on my MacBook Pro).

So, I tried several different distributions, and have stuck with OpenSUSE 10.3.  It has a feel of 'just works' for me, despite the problem getting GRUB working on a MBP (which is documented) I have had no problems with it.

OpenSUSE is not without its problems, but they are more minor to me for day-2-day stuff, the package manager is relatively slow for example, but that doesn't really affect me post-install.  I have had a quick play with OpenSUSE 11 Alpha 3 as well, it is too unstable for me at the moment, but there are massive improvements to the package manager.  I am really looking forward to this becomming a final release.

Compared to Ubuntu it is much more asthetically pleasing and I am one of those freaks that actually likes SLAB (the OpenSUSE replacement for Gnome Menu).

One thing that does kind of annoy me for some really strange reason is no one seems to be able to pronounce SUSE, even Linux veterans, and I would imagine this would annoy Germans more than me.  The closest the English can get to pronounce is is 'soo-zuh', not 'soose', 'suzy' or 'sooz'.

Its been over a week since PHP London '08 and I have been thinking about which angle to write a blog post about it.  I have also been incredibly busy since then so haven't had a chance to write much in my blog.

So, it was a fantastic day, and I met some great people.  Did I learn anything?  Yes.  Don't trust our hosting company with anything, we had a server failure whilst I was in Stefan Esser's talk which I am not happy about.  Apart from that I don't think there was much to learn from the main stream for the target audience for the conference.  The smaller room had some more advanced topics which were of more interest to me.

Ivo's talk at the start of the day was brilliant, certainly kept the audiance engaged.  Project Zero was interesting but I can't see it being used by our company.  PHP testing (or lack of) was also pretty interesting to me, something I would help with if I had some spare time.  Derick Rethans was a great choice to round up the day.

In summary I am cetainly looking forward to next year's conference.

In Ubuntu Hardy the default PHPUnit in the repository is 3.0.6.  So have created a package in my download area to upgrade this to 3.2.15.  This should install just as well on Ubuntu Gutsy as it does on Hardy and should work on all processor types.

You can download my package here.