*Disclaimer: the following narration is for entertainment purposes only and does not necessarily reflect any real scenarios...or does it?

Let's follow a seemingly "simple" task for an average Linux user:

Scenario: Install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu System

This sounds simple enough. Anyone familiar with Rails, knows there are 4 easy steps to installing a Rails web model:
1. Install Rubygems
2. Update Ruby Gem system
3. Install...

My first attempt to upgrade to Karmic was met with an error about ubuntu-minimal missing. The problem being the mirror I had selected was not synced with the new distro yet. (The "Select Best Server" option probably thought it was a good mirror precisely because nobody was downloading thousands of packages from it yet) So after switching to a different mirror, the upgrade went pretty smoothly.

In addition to the improvements one can find on many another review, a few things...

I was in Birmingham airport at the end of March this year in WHSmith looking for a magazine to read during the flight. I was in the middle of editing the company web site at the time, an on going project but I was doing it all on XP, my company PC. That months Linux Format magazine had an article on Google web master tools and Java script and after a brief flick threw the magazine I bought it. I read the article on the plane and a bit more besides. The free CD had PC Linux OS on it. I had a go of...

I upgraded my Ubuntu 8.10 laptop to 9.04 a few days ago when it came out. While the release seems good, there were some undesireable side-effects caused by the upgrade, my configuration, or the new release itself.

1. In the upgrade process itself is a serious flaw. If a package cannot be downloaded, for example because of an inadequate or too crowded network connection, or the server on the other end, the upgrade process quits, giving me no option to try again. This results in a huge amount

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Hello

Many people have posted on the 'net, describing VirtualBox PUEL upgrade as straightforward. My experience of several upgrades was very different with quite some breakage, repair and grief Here's the procedure I have evolved by experimentation to make it less painful, more routine. Several of the specifics (paths, virtual machine name WXP, Kaspersky, TweakUI, and my personal user name is c on ubuntu and C on WXP virtual) will be different on other systems but it should...