How About the Good Old Days? Dustin Kirkland's Ubuntu Museum
Texan Dustin Kirkland shows that it doesn't take heaps of cash and government funding to open a museum. All by himself he opened one exclusively for Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu Museum consists of a webpage that displays Ubuntu versions since the beginning years of the software. If those were the good old days, some amount of browsing the galleries will reveal.
Among the interesting exponents of the museum is the collection of screenshots of the various Ubuntu releases, from Warty Warthog through Jaunty Jackalope. To the right of the screenshots are links to the boot sequences for each release -- certainly cause for nostalgia.
Still further to the right on the webpage are the download links for the Ubuntu versions to bring them to life again in a virtual machine. These are the desktop versions inclusive of all updates, although only the unsupported versions can be downloaded.
Kirkland came up with the idea of a museum while regression testing the virtualization stack for Ubuntu's KVM package, according to his blog. He and Jamie Strandboge "kicked around" the idea of "Linux museums" six months ago, Strandboge having since branched off to found yet another virtual museum called the Debian Archives.
"I find some strange satisfaction," says Kirkland, "hitting a few old, memomorable bugs and then thinking 'boy, am I glad we fixed that!'." He is also pleased with the improved Ubuntu startup and shutdown times over the years.
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