The lack of blogging and Lessons learned.

Well I have been 'vacationing' from Fedora for a bit, and work has been rather crazy with various people trying to make up for the 2 jobs David Northrop did.. so I have not really had much urge to blog. However I am going to be changing that hopefully in the coming weeks as the school goes into winter break and I can work on puppet and stuff.

One thing that I have done is work with other operating systems during my vacation to get an idea of where OS's are these days.

1. OpenSolaris. Wow.. this really could do with a 'modern' package management system. I guess some of the blends come with one, but the version I tried on my Sparc Blade was painful to work with. I thought about doing some rpm work there but ran into other issues.

2. MacOS-10.4. Ok I got to spend some time seeing how this OS is set up and I can see the pretty factor.. Installation and removal of stuff seems pretty easy (well except when it isnt) but wow. it is a pain in the butt to find applications at time. I have applications in my tree, my kid's tree and in the main tree.. and some of them are duplicates.. and wow.

3. MacOS-10.5. I now understand the beauty of a 5 second startup. I spend most of my time watching servers where each peripheal card can take 5-20 seconds to set-itself up. The amount of time to get X going is a trivial amount of waiting compared to the various other times. But sitting at the Imac and being able to get to a browser within 30 seconds of turning the system on does have an emotional impact I was not aware of. Finding applications is still a pain.. I guess I am still too menu driven in my logic to understand the Mac way.. but it has been interesting to see what the various Desktop groups are trying to 'keep' up with.

I will be looking at 'administration' of these systems next to see what they have that might be nice to have and what I just can't grok. After that.. I am hoping to have a system where I can run 'Vista' so I can get a full spectrum of what computing is like for others. And then it will be time to look at Fedora Server projects that would be useful to jump into.