Ubuntu 6.10 Rocks!
Ubuntu 6.10, EdgyEft, has shipped. Downloaded it overnight, via Bittorrent. Burned a CD, booted it from my laptop, and am typing this with it. Recognized my wireless networking hardware, and connected to my wifi router. Booting was, of course, much slower than Puppy, but it's very responsive now that it's up. Sound works, but the music player doesn't grok MP4 audio, which is the format of most of my ripped CDs. It doesn't even do MP3s. So only one song, in OGG format, from my 128 albums was recognized. EasyUbuntu fixed the problem, though I had to copy packagelist-dapper.dop and packagelist-dapper.xml to packagelist-edgy.dop and packagelist-edgy.xml. I'm sure the EasyUbuntu folks will fix that soon. Emacs isn't on the CD, but this is Debian, so installation was a simple matter of "sudo apt-get install emacs". I could get to like this.
Easyubuntu
The problem Easyubuntu had was related to the PLF ( Penguin Liberation Front ) archive.
No one volunteered to maintain their ubuntu archive, so the owner did what he normally does ... he shut it down, and waited for someone to volunteer to maintain it. I took less than a day of being off-line before volunteers appeared ... that archive is the only one in a jurisdiction where the judges refuse to cooperate with MPAA and RIAA attempts to shut down DeCSS and unlicensed distribution of video and audio codecs.
I suspect the Easyubuntu and Automatix folks suddenly decided that they needed to volunteer in order to keep the archive they depended on running.
Works on MacBook
I'm typing this booted from my Ubuntu 6.10 CD on my son's MacBook. Mouse, sound, wireless network, and Firefox all work. Much slower to boot than OSX, though. And not as pretty, though very nice looking for Linux.
Ubuntu Persistence
I followed the directions on the LiveCDPersistence page to create a "casper-rw" looped file system on my USB flash drive. Lets me boot off the CD, and save my state.
But I'm typing this at Puppy Linux, which lives with XP on my NTFS partition, and is all set up for my work and play. Not as pretty or featureful as Ubuntu, but I still like it.
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