I’ve been off on holiday for almost two weeks now - last week was ‘real’ holiday - totally disconnected. I didn’t even have my phone on! This week I had to succumb and have been tinkering.

I’ve got some plans coming up that need me to have my Linux skills a bit more polished than they are currently so I thought I’d take the opportunity of some playtime to get back in practice.I dug out my various old boxes to see if I could get one or two working, and then started thinking about what flavour Linux to go for.

Historically, I’ve always used whatever I’ve been using in production environments. Firstly FreeBSD many (many) moons ago when I was hosted with Donhost, more recently Red Hat Fedora as most boxes I look after are with Rackspace (love them!) and run Red Hat ES3. But neither distro has really clicked with me as they’re both a bit of a pain.

In my own tinkerings I got heavily into Debian based distros when I was trying to set up a wireless network mesh before it was announced that my village would get Broadband in a sensible period of time (hence all the boxes I have kicking around) and I’ve blogged previously about trials with Gentoo. This time, I thought I’d give Ubuntu a go and so downloaded the 7.04 Server CD (I thought support would be better than Gutsy Gibbon) .

I’ve got two systems installed fine - one to play with as a dev box and one as something more stable. I want another one as I want to play with clustering, but I’m running out of decent spec hardware - I’m currently fighting to install on a K6-2 machine with 96MB RAM (all I can scrounge!) but it keeps constantly rebooting after the install but I know why - I’m writing this while I wait for ’sudo apt-get install linux-image-386′ to finish whirring. [Postscript - can't do this with only 96MB RAM - but 128MB is enough! Oh, I wish I knew where all those SIMMs I'd been keeping are!]

What else is new - thanks to Mat’s suggestion in a comment on an earlier posting I tried installing Xubuntu on a retired laptop, but I fear the spec is a bit too lowly - again I can only scrape 96MB of RAM together and even trying to install off the Alternate CD it ends up stalling. I did get a command line install running (took a couple of hours to install!) but it’s not much fun. Back to Win Me methinks.

And one of the reasons for all this - my realisation that as good as the NSLU2 might be for acting as a backup filesystem, it’s not up to much for network services - it’s sooooo slooooow!

Anyway, I can see why many people who’s opinion I trust rave about Ubuntu - it’s slick, straightforward, and … works!