Not so long ago...

I have just installed Apache, Postgres and PHP on a new virtual machine. Not set up Postgres yet, but the rest is running; 5 minutes was all it took.

I was reminded of the time not so long ago when both PHP and Postgres had to be compiled from source - and that took a lot more than 5 minutes! Progress can be good, and thanks to the hard work of a lot of people dedicated to open source, I now have access to tools that I could hardly have imagined only a decade ago. I should probably spend more time reflecting on these kinds of things.        

Minty

This morning I installed Mint 14. Early days, but it comes with Oracle's JRE 1.7 which is the only JRE that seems to work with the Juniper firewall the university uses. SO that saved quite a bit of messing around.  MATE is clean and so much better than Unity. Pretty much everything up and running including updates, the LVM disks and fstab mounts, my VMs and Open Office and some menu customization in under two hours.   

Postscript:  However, there are some significant irritants. First, the text editor, gedit, is simply renamed pluma; it doesn't look or do anything different: Why? Alacarte, the menu editor that worked reasonably well in Ubuntu, seems to be broken. Getting my menus looking like they were in Ubuntu took twice as long as installing the system. The shine has worn off in less than a day.