On Sunday night, the SD card in my phone became corrupt when I plugged it in to my PC (I don’t know why) – but that’s a story for another day. It was when I was fixing it that I realised about how Windows, in the past 5 or 6 years, has moved gradually into a truly consumer-space operating system.

What do I mean by this?

Well think back to the days of Windows XP. It really was the do-it-all operating system – developers could get right down into the system internals and hack around as they pleased with their apps, and you could get a lot of applications which bypassed OS components to perform functionality for you; in this case, formatting bad memory cards.

So you may have seen TweetMeme went a little Joggler-crazy last week, with a grand total of 6 turning up in our office (although not all at the same time).

This is because Dom turned up one day, said they were on offer for £50, showed us all the software and hardware hacks, and we were all completely sold!

I’d like to tell you about all the hacks we’ve managed so far a little later on. But for now, here are some unboxing shots and the default OS in action.

I’ve been playing around with getting started building Android (I’d like to get 2.0 working on my Joggler). To build Android under Linux, you need the sun-java5-jdk package.

This is due to a conflict in the @Override command, which means you can’t use the Java 6 JDK for this task.

Unfortunately the sun-java5-jdk package isn’t available by default in the Karmic or Lucid repositories, so you need to grab it from somewhere else. To save you searching, here’s the howto:

After months of struggling, hard toil, and generally getting pretty annoyed at Unfuddle, I’ve finally found the one and only way to get Subversion to run at a respectable and somewhat useful speed.

In other news, today I’ve installed and configured Subversion and Memcache and properly setup MySQL on the box labelled “Subversion Server” (it doesn’t do just that), which I think is quite an achievement considering my practically non-existent sysadmin skills.

So, over the weekend (I did a lot of tinkering ) I downloaded and installed the latest flavour of the Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Installation was a breeze, it was simple for me as I just overwrote everything on the hard drive. The installation has been simplified slightly, making it a bit easier to do and some improved functionality like the location map being a bit more intelligent.

So, I booted it up, and entered quite possibly the fastest thing I have ever seen running on this machine. It’s a Dell Inspiron, at least 3 generations and 4 years old, so it doesn’t usually perform that well. This, however, runs like it’s on fire. Simple tasks and general apps are so quick to load, and the new Firefox 3 beta goes like there’s nothing left to do.

My other favourite features are the rather nice new background, but more importantly nice features like it using the full resolution of my external monitor (where Feisty used to run a 20″, 1600×1050 monitor at 1024×768 ) and the all-improved password facilities – instead of having to enter the root password to access a dialog box with only one restricted function, you can access the whole box and then just “unlock” those functions to enter your password and continue.

All in all, Hardy Heron is a great long term support system, and I’m sure any minor bugs will be worked out in coming updates. I’m looking forward to 8.10, more features, and increased usability for newbies so that Ubuntu can spread itself to computer users everywhere.