It’s Spring

Yes, it is spring now. No, I don’t mean the season but the new distribution on my lappie.

From the time I quit CSC, I’ve been using k/ubuntu for stable production work with little time for distro trials.
I picked up March and May issues of `Linux For You`and to my delight I found slackware12 and mandriva 2008.1 lying cute and cuddly in their shiny seal covers.
Then came hopping, the bully of our house a.k.a my girlfriend and snatched the slackware DVD to fulfill her new found madness – “Distro trials on Virtualbox”. 😛

So, I spent my night yesterday installing and configuring mandriva spring. It took almost 5 hours to finish backups, installation, Look & Feel hacking, installing my requirements (apache, MySQL, Django, python, php) and a bunch other packages.
As a part of Look & Feel hacking, kiba-dock is the new app that makes it to my list; it took time to configure it not to look bloated, decide & place my launchers, refine the shadows & effects and last but not least was to suppress the black background render by using xcompmgr package.

I thought I did everything right, but no – I did screw up. I forgot to backup the database being used by my django models. No worries, it was just test database being used for my django learning. 🙂

Using debian derivatives has made me depend on deb packages. I also installed alien in case I need some packages from my backed up archives when I am away from internet.

That finished my configuration to be used for stable work. It feels good getting back to mandriva – the distro I was faithful to (mandrake 10.1 – mandriva 2006.)