Rob’s Findings

The folks behind Ruby on Rails have taken THE step, they’re phasing out product support for IE6! I can only hope that this is followed up by a flurry of announcements from other organizations that are going to follow suit. There was a time when IE6 was a leader, but that was a long time ago. User’s have plenty of alternative options (yes, flooding the company IT staff with requests to upgrade is an option).

I’ve got a couple of older PC’s, both were Windows 98 machines when they were new. While attempting to install some of the more recent versions of Ubuntu on these machines I encountered various errors during the install phase or on first bootup after installation. After playing around a bit and trying various boot options I found a fairly simple solution that worked on both boxes: perform the initial install using the Breezy release, then update your sources list to Dapper and run apt-get dist-upgrade to get up-to-date with a fully supported version. Dapper was an LTS release, so if you’re running the server version of Ubuntu you’ll still be able to get updates until 2010. Throw a controller card and big hard drive in a machine like this, add Ubuntu server, and you’ve got yourself one heck of a network storage device.