Download and try the following OS, and give it a go. I’m actually using Ubuntu to host this website and a number of other clients sites, although I’m using the 10.04 LTS edition. LTS editions have longer lifecycles, which saves you having to rebuild your server so often – and patches are supplied for the life of the edition. Ubuntu Linux v10.10 Ubuntu is a Linux 2.6 based Operating system, and is, simple and well supported with “Graphical based” installers and tools.

Apple released Bootcamp 2.1 with OS 10.5, which allows you to dual boot to Windows XP/Vista on your Mac. Subsequenet to that release, there was a driver update for the Multitouch trackpad which was suppose to improve souble tapping, etc. However it caused a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) the moment you double tapped, courtesy of applemtp.sys. Many people sent suggestions to Apple to fix this, but it seemed to be falling on deaf ears.

Last Friday at work my Mac (OS X 10.4) laptop HDD died. After the purchase of an extra external HDD and some custom recovery software, Data Rescue II, I tried to recover as much as I could. The bad news is the Hard drive had not just gotten corrupted, but failed. After an attempt to clone it to a second drive for analysis, and during my recovery attempt it developed the click of death.

You’ve got a household full of PC’s and you’ve stopped yourself from getting a Mac because you don’t want to deal with incompatibilities. Eight years ago that would’ve been understandable, but today Mac OS and Windows can work together in harmony on the same home network. Here’s a primer on how the two systems inter-operate. I have been using Macs now for 5 years, and the compatibility issues that one would have been there are practically gone.

Jonathan Schwartz the SUN CTO detailed on his blog about the new deal between Sun and IBM that allows IBM to offer Solaris x86 as a supported OS on their hardware. What does this mean for sysadmins around the world? More Solaris. That’s OK in my books. The less windows servers the better. Someone should tell IBM about their new interest.

This is an article by Fortune’s Owen Thomas on Vista not being compatible with SQL Server. An excerpt: ‘But now Microsoft has a problem. Vista, its long-awaited update to the Windows operating system, can’t run the current version of SQL Server. The company is working on a SQL upgrade that is compatible with Vista – called SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2 – but it’s in beta and can be licensed only for testing purposes.