Finally figured out what’s hanging my linux box – GAIM, my IM client. Can’t say I’m shocked, there have been a ton of updates lately.

It’s driving me pretty close to using Ubuntu Linux though. I’ve tried Debian, Gentoo, and have been (and still am) a long time user of Red Hat & Fedora. The box currently has Fedora Core 2 on it, and Fedora Core 3 hasn’t come out fast enough for me.

Gnome 2.8 is sexy.

Ubuntu, as a Debian derivative is very interesting me. 6 month release cycles (similar to Fedora), tied to Gnome releases, which are 6 months as well (close, but not quite similar to Fedora).

I am very excited about the community aspect of Ubuntu – Debian with all the updates, contributed back to the Debian core teams, funded by a .com millionaire to make a great Linux distro. As a huge Gnome fan, their Gnome integration looks (from the outside) fabulous. All the power of apt-get, with the power of Debian.

I always hated the Debian installer – I had to actually get help at a TCLUG installfest to get installed (damn network). Ubuntu looks to take some of that complexity away. In addition, their interesting choice of using sudo instead of a root account is intriguing.

I tried their pre-release on my laptop, but it wouldn’t boot, but I’m sure it was ACPI related. I just didn’t spend the 15 minutes needed to find the boot command. I burned the final version last week – I’m going to get on my linux box as I backed up my music and email a day or two ago, and then my laptop and AMD64 box right after that.

More to come.