Thursday, October 8, 2009

Back to Ubuntu!

Okay I finally gave up on OpenSolaris and switched back to Ubuntu. I am kind of bummed, back in 1994 I started my career working on SunOs boxes (now Solaris) on a Sparc 10 working at an ISP. I eventually left as the office / systems manager, and really enjoyed working with the OS then. It was one of the most secure and stable OS's at the time for running a shop, although I am sure everyone has their own critique on that and which is the best (BSD, Slackware, et. all). But I had high hopes for OpenSolaris. It's just not "there" yet, hopefully in the coming year or two they will shape up and I can give them a shot again.

Now that I am back on Ubuntu I am so happy, it just works. Everything I wanted to do, I can do again, and without problem. It seems also to run quite a bit faster than OpenSolaris on the X86 hardware I have, I have more headroom it seems to run a few more Virtual boxes, and not only that but I am also able to run 5 desktops, Firefox and Google Chrome Beta for Ubuntu.

Mediatomb just works, Handbrake just works, pyTivo just works. I am once again happy about the OS but unhappy about the software RAID. It's soo slow on copying things compared to ZFS, and very slow when adding drives or building the raid itself. Once I lost a drive, it took nearly 18 hours to rebuild the array thrashing the hard drives the entire time.

I notice they have ZFS for Ubuntu now located here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS and a good little how to do various things here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS/ZPool.

Hopefully this weekend I will finally get my OPML tutorial up and running and on the forums, I haven't been to the playonplugins site in a while, and I have to say I am really happy lately with the latest version of PlayOn as it seems to be working a LOT better with Netflix than in the past for me by far.

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