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)

Dapper has Ruby 1.8.4 (though labelled as 1.8.2 in the package list) and ImageMagick 6.2.  Ruby 1.8.4 has some known problems that are fixed in 1.8.6 and the rmagick gem recently updated to version 2, reportedly fixing the memory leaks, but it requires ImageMagick 6.3.

We backported Ruby 1.8.6 p111 and ImageMagick 6.3 from the latest development version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) to Dapper.  They’ve been in use on a few boxes and no problems so far.  Feel free to make use of them.  We’ll be backporting any security updates as they come.

General details of the repository are here, with specific information about Ruby 1.8.6 and ImageMagick 6.3 on their own pages.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron is due out in the next few month, which brings a lot of this stuff with it.  Some of you might have the luxury of being able to upgrade to it, but some may need to stick with Dapper for a while – hopefully these packages will help you out.