LinuxJedi's /dev/null

I have created an Ubuntu Hardy PPA (Personal Package Archive) which contains all my PHP packages (memcached, APC and phpunit).  It can be found at:

https://launchpad.net/~andrew-linuxjedi/+archive

This means you can add it to your APT sources and it will automatically update when a new package is available.  It also automatically builds my packages for i386 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu.  I will remove my copies from my download area very soon in preference of this.

Me being the fickle person I am when it comes to a Linux distro I have snuggled back up with Ubuntu Hardy.

After a month of playing with OpenSUSE 10.3 things were going great, then I needed a package or 2 which were non-standard, which needed dependancies, which broke other dependancies and before long I was in depandancy hell!  It was at this point I thought "This crap doesn't happen with a DEB package manager".

I had a quick play with OpenSUSE 11 alpha 3 (with pain) and after about an hour formatted my Linux partition again, it is noway near usable on this laptop yet.

So I re-installed Ubuntu Hardy (using a MacBook pro I needed a version that would support all hardware out of the box), this time the Beta version.  Boy was I suprised at the change in such a short time.  Everything that had been a show stopper for me was fixed.  Not only that but there was an update today for Open Office 2.4 and it is fantastic, the font rendering is much better and I can't even remember any of the other reasons why I was put off.

I can have Compiz and suspend on this MacBook Pro!  This hasn't happened on any distro so far!

My only bugbear, and this is with all current distros, is that Evolution is very buggy with the Exchange connector.  At the moment I will find once a day it just refuses to work anymore saying it that Evolution has lost connection with the Exchange connector.  Killing every evolution spawned process doesn't seem to fix this either, I need to reboot.  I believe the libmapi library may well be used in Ubuntu Intrepid which should solve most of these problems.

All in all I am very satisfied with Hardy, and will be keeping it on this laptop, I'm even considering flattening the MacOS install from this laptop, as I can't remember the last time I booted it and its eating around 60GB.

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'.

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.

Not content with just creating PHP APC packages for Ubuntu Hardy, I have also created updates for the current Memcached and PHP5 Memcache packages as they are a couple of versions old now.

Again these should re-compile on 32bit machines with ease and probably Gutsy too.