Hey folks, my first blog post here. I thought it was time I posted something so here it is

As you will know by now the new version of Ubuntu is due out in the next week, that big banner on the sidebar may have given it away. So I plan to spend the next week trying out a new Linux distribution each day to see how I get on before eventually moving to Ubuntu 7.10. I’ve tried a few different distributions in the past but since moving to Ubuntu about a year ago, I have be honest, I haven’t tried much else, certainly not outside of VMware. I guess I got comfortable and just didn’t bother. Since I will be upgrading my system to the new Ubuntu anyway, now seems like a good time to take a little tour of the Linux world and see what’s happening. I can’t promise it will be comprehensive with so many distributions out there though, I can’t try them all in a week so I’ve made a hit list of the major ones I want to try out:

PCLinuxOS 2007 - Never tried this but heard about it quite a lot.

OpenSuSE 10.3 - As much as I hate the Microsoft/Novell deal I have used SuSE in the past and it was my first ever Linux distribution so I owe it another chance.

Mandriva 2008 - Another distribution that has been an old friend to me, the new 2008 version is fresh out this week so I figured I’d try it.

Slackware 12 - I’ve never used Slackware but it has a strong following and has been around a long time. Can’t wait to see what it’s like.

Fedora 7 - This disc has been sat on my desk for ages, I’ve used Fedora and Red Hat many times in the past, the last version I used was Fedora 5 so it’s been a while.

Debian Etch - Lastly I will try out Debian, the distribution which has spawned so many others including Ubuntu of course. I’ve used it on the odd server but never on my desktop, it has a reputation as the purists OS, awkward to use but powerful. We’ll see.

So that’s about it, I missed a few obvious ones I know. Gentoo is not in there basically because I’m not a sadist and I don’t want to compile everything. I have used Sabayon before which is supposed to be the easy to use version of Gentoo but I didn’t bother with it in this experiment as I figured I have enough on my plate.

So that’s it, I’ve backed up my /home partition with rsync and I’m almost ready to go, just got some md5 sums to check and some discs to burn and then I’m off. Wish me luck, I will report back… I hope