Lost and disillusioned at having their thunder stolen by a bunch of smart-alec engineers, the marketing guys at Sun decided to introduce their own innovation in Solaris 10 by designing a new logo:

"And with this historic Solaris 10 release comes a new logo -- a logo that captures the energy and power of this unparalleled platform. A logo that was designed and tested with disciplines and rigors that took their cue from the Solaris operating system itself."

Altogether now: WAAAAAAAAANNNKEEEERRRRRRSSSSS!!!

Hubris and impatience once again overcame caution and bitter experience this weekend, as I upgraded my PC to Fedora Core 3. I had planned to hold back until FC4, but with no news or roadmap announced, and an increasing urge to use the GIMP v2.2.2, I caved in and downloaded the FC3 ISOs. Backing up all the vital config files, crossing my fingers and fingering my cross, I rebooted into the installer.

Executive summary: f**k me, it works!

That's right, after it came back up, the mouse still worked, the audio still worked and all my peripherals were visible, which makes it some kind of roaring, champagne-worthy success for those bozos^*. In fact, it seems extremely stable all round so far.

Here's my list of hints and tips for upgrading to FC3:

• Nothing, it just works. Honest. I'm not delirious, although I suppose shock is a possibility.

So instead, here are my impressions of Fedora Core after three releases. It's a fully-featured, workable - I hesitate to say astounding - Linux distro, if you can tolerate the more-than-just-occasional bug and breakage. Support is mostly good in terms of updates (security fixes are timely), although you only get the newest versions if you're running the most recent Core release (anything older typically only gets vulnerability fixes), hence my GIMP dilemma. This is my major complaint; it would be acceptable if upgrading between releases was less of an event. Downloading four ISO images, taking the machine down for 3-4 hours while Anaconda does its stuff and then repairing the bits that broke is unacceptable for a distro with such a rapid release cycle. The "dist-upgrade" option in APT needs to work (people have tried it with some success, but it is not supported and it will need some manual fix-ups that aren't well documented). Debian have been doing this for years, and yet they have the longest stable release cycle of anyone.

(The day after the upgrade, the project announced a planned May release for FC4, so the effort and risk wasn't even wasted.)

^*Affectionate sysadmin term for developers.

A C Grayling suggests that you can be too tolerant in this comment on the play Behzti and it's alleged offence to Sikhs, but goes equally for the BBC's grand inquisitors: you have the right to practise your faith, but the responsibility to accept free speech about it. Unless you have some kind of weak, pansy-ass, bed-wetting religion that can't withstand a little robust criticism.

I've made some further enchancements to SARGE, the SAR graphing package. I tried to run them past Ed Finch, the original author, but email to the address on his web page bounced.

I'd still like to see SARGE store the data in RRD files...we'll see how bored I get this year.

Virtually every photographer in London seems to shoot the redesigned Great Courtyard in the British Museum, but that didn't stop me either.

Others soon weighed in with even more fine shots.