Yesterday, we updated our workgroup server to the latest version of Ubuntu – Feisty Fawn – and so far we’ve been happy with it. We’re a little late in updating, though that was primarily us being careful on a production machine. The main reason for updating, actually, was due to an issue with PHP.
We’ve been doing some work in PHP lately that makes use of the GD library to do some interesting graphics manipulations. One of the components of the project made use of a transparency color for an image resource, and it seemed like there may have been a bug in the imagefill function: filling with a color of -1 caused the php processor to segfault. What was odd, was a different version (on my Mac), wasn’t crashing at all. This prompted the update to the latest Ubuntu. The latest version, 5.2.1, solved the problem and we were good to go.
Doing an Update (from Edgy to Feisty):
A distribution upgrade with Ubuntu is cake: simply edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and replace “edgy” with “feisty”. Next, update the sources list (apt-get update will do it), and finally do a dist-upgrade (apt-get dist-upgrade). Check out this article for more details, as well as how to do a dist-upgrade using the GUI.
