Pythoneering

After many years of using SuSE Linux (ever since version 5.4 or something like that) I’ve finally defected to Ubuntu. This morning, I fired up the Ubuntu 6.10 ‘Edgy’ Live DVD, double-clicked on Install, and that was that.

Well, not quite. At first, I could boot into neither Ubuntu nor Windows! The problem was that Ubuntu’s bootloader had been installed onto hd0, but the BIOS had the system’s other drive coming first in the boot sequence, which triggered the old bootloader. Once I realised what was going on, it was easy to fix — but I think that Ubuntu’s otherwise foolproof install procedure could do with a bit more polish when it comes to specifying where and how grub is installed.

Things seem OK now (although I have yet to try booting into Windows , and I’ve spent the past couple of hours installing useful stuff from the DVD.  I’m pretty impressed by what I’ve seen so far, but, as a former SuSEr, I’m finding the whole software repositories thing a little confusing, not helped by the fact that the description and screenshots provided in the online docs for Edgy don’t match what I have on my machine!

Whilst scanning The Register today, I came across an advert for a book review that began “Calling all Rails developers that want to learn Ruby!” Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I would have thought it would be advisable to learn Ruby before trying to use Rails?

After Adrian’s announcement that a Django book was in the pipeline, I just had to place my advance order with Amazon (like many other Djangonauts, I suspect). Since then, news on the book’s progress has been hard to come by. Not any more, though, with the appearance of www.djangobook.com.

This site will allow the Django community to participate in the production of Adrian and Jacob’s book, in much the same way that Bruce Eckel has allowed readers to comment on his material as it is written. Of course, the Django book site is a much more impressive piece of work than Eckel’s system, showing off Adrian and Jacob’s ‘leet web dev skills to the full. It is Django-powered (natch) and distinctively styled, with a neat mechanism for viewing and adding comments and an Atom feed so that we can all keep track of new chapters as they appear. Excellent stuff.