Now with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy powers 2 Oct 08

We’ve now switched to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) as our default Brightbox image.

We’ve been using Hardy for months now to power our managed products and clusters and it’s proved very stable.  Some of the highlights:

• Ruby 1.8.6 as standard
• Apache 2.2.8 as standard
• Imagemagick 6.3 as standard (roll on the new rmagick gems!)
• Git 1.5.4 as standard
• Better virtualisation support - we can now live upgrade ram on Brightboxes without a reboot

It still comes pre-configured for Rails deployment and we’re still providing improved and extra packages where necessary (such as nginx 6.31).

We’re also still supporting our Ubuntu Dapper machines and can still pre-install Dapper for customers who are already using it on their other boxes.

Upgrading

Due to the way Brightboxes are built, you can’t easily upgrade your Dapper box to Hardy.  Currently, the only supported way to upgrade is to file a support ticket with us and we’ll rebuild your Brightbox as Hardy.  This will require downtime and redeployment of your app (a good time to move to the new Brightbox deployment gem if you haven’t already)

When Brightbox met Kodefoo 17 Aug 07

I popped over to the GeekUp Leeds event on Wednesday at The Lounge. It’s a fairly new event (in Leeds anyway) and it was my first time, but it was fun to catch up with Rob Lee (of Kodefoo). We’ve been using the now infamous Apache 2.2 package that Rob backported from Ubuntu Feisty to Dapper for quite some time now, but completely unaware that Rob/Kodefoo is based only a couple of miles away in Otley!

Such a small world, eh?