hypatia dot ca

I just rebooted my work desktop into Karmic Koala, the new release of Ubuntu, my preferred distribution of GNU/Linux.  I don’t have much substantive to say, but the qualitative experience has so far been pretty amazing.

Not only did I get to work all day while the upgrade was downloading, only having to reboot at the very end, but everything worked as I expected when I rebooted – which is to say that the only thing which didn’t work was VMWare, which I expected to not work as with every kernel upgrade.  I might even take this as an opportunity to give Virtualbox a proper try (it was less than amazing last time I did).

Let me make that really clear – I only had about twenty minutes of downtime for the entire upgrade, and it would have been less if the installer had left upgrading Firefox until the end, as that was the only thing which broke (and even then, only partly – no new urls, but clicking through links was fine) while the upgrade was going on.  Try that with Windows :)

Things feel just a little snappier, just a little shinier.  I’m really impressed so far.  The new theme and icon set is lovely.

If you’ve been putting off trying out Ubuntu or Linux in general, now’s a great time to start!

I gave my first Ignite talk last week at DemoCamp.  If you’re unfamiliar with the format, you have 20 slides which advance automatically every 15 seconds, giving you a total of 5 minutes to talk.  It’s a fun format, but I was amazed at how much more quickly those slides flashed by when I was in front of an audience than when I was practicing.

My slides were mostly photos, and I had notes co-ordinated with them.  I’ve put the presentation on Slideshare, but they don’t share presentation notes well, so I’ll include them here.  The bullets are numbered the same as the corresponding slides.  Read them really fast and you’ll get an accurate impression of how my talk went (at least until the video gets posted, ruh roh).  Slides and notes below the jump.

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