[Update] One of my readers just commented that this upgrade is for people who own both the Adobe and Macromedia bundles. "To use the web bundle upgrade you need to own Adobe Creative Suite 1.x AND Macromedia Studio MX 2004 / MX." (Thanks, Rob.) Not much of a deal, then, I guess -- oh, well. It would be great if people could upgrade to the bundle from one *or* the other and also from Studio 8. Perhaps these are just the initial bundles and there will be others to follow..?

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I'm sure the US site will be updated as the work day for the EST and PST folk begins but here's a sneak peek at the new Macromedia UK web site:

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It doesn't look like things are going too well between Ubuntu and myself.

I just had a total system freeze. Even holding down the power button didn't send the Term signal or whatever that it did before (when, admittedly, I tapped it out of curiosity.) Man, I haven't had that in *ages* with Windows! Application freezes, occasionally, yes, but not a whole system freeze. I thought that didn't happen on Linux...

Well, anyway, I was trying to get Ruby on Rails up and running before the freeze and it wasn't going well. I was getting a routing error (and apparently I'm not the only one) and I suspect it has something to do with the version of ActiveRecord or gems or something or other. RoR is a *bitch* to set up. Whatever happened to providing me with a package that I can unzip (sorry, untar) and run with? No, I had to go to Synaptic and download Gems and then get rails from Gems and then realize that somewhere along the line there was an issue (I think the Gem thing gave an error initially but worked when I re-ran it -- it's the main suspect at the moment.)

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Well, this using Ubuntu fling has turned into a full-blown adventure.

First, it wasn't picking up that my laptop could handle 1400x1050. So, after following instructions on three different sites, I ended up downloading a hugely useful tool called 855resolution. But -- and it's a big but -- I had to *compile* it before I could run it. Welcome to Linux, I guess!

So I tried compiling it as per the instructions on the Installing Ubuntu on Acer Travelmate 4651LCi page but got a pageful of errors. After some head-scratching, I realized that the C compiler on my machine was not of the same version as my kernel. Umm, yeah -- I hate it when that happens. So, it was back to the Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic...) and I downloaded the correct version and tried with that. Bingo! Umm, what was I doing again? Oh yes, the resolution. So I ran the utility and added it to some startup script and now I'm running at native resolution. Is Ubuntu ready for prime-time? NO WAY! :) Can you imagine a regular Joe, trying to switch from Windows, having to compile a utility and add it to his startup script before getting native resolution on his laptop. Ain't gonna happen, no way, no how! :)

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Don't type "kill -9 -1" -- it has the nasty effect of shutting down your computer :)