So Ubuntu is utterly refus­ing to install and I’m scared to use Gen­too, which was vaguely the next resort. And I’ve had enough of Cen­tOS’ absurd pack­age man­age­ment sys­tem (really, RPM does make things impos­si­bly dif­fi­cult com­pared to apt-based sys­tems). I’m going to try installing FreeBSD tomor­row and com­pil­ing bits and pieces, because that’s how metro stayed online all those years and whilst I don’t have Dale’s skill, I don’t doubt that the method­ol­ogy was sound. Plus, FreeBSD is one more envi­ron­ment to test this project on — a ded­i­cated server we were vaguely offered a few months back is run­ning NetBSD, so it’d be good to begin scratch­ing together a hand­ful of skills in that area, just in case!

On the plus side, I got all sys­tem con­fig­u­ra­tion stuff (esp. Samba, which can be a lot more dif­fi­cult than per­haps it should be at times) worked out last week (i.e. the sys­tem was nearly per­fect, but for being utterly unable to install even SRPM pack­ages of a more recent Python ver­sion), and Michael went through installing every­thing with me at work… we had to bat­tle Win­dows a lit­tle there, but even it relented. So close. Then I’ll spend heaps of time cut­ting lay­outs to markup and see­ing them work­ing, and non-Youthworks time tak­ing Satchmo for a spin (which will hope­fully lend itself to a cer­tain appli­ca­tion very nicely). The lovely thing about all this is I need Django to work for CYIADA, so I’m sup­ported in get­ting it up and run­ning, but then have enough ‘spare’ hours in the week that I can engage in free­lance projects that ulti­mately mean I know what’s going on with CYIADA and am mildly more com­pe­tent to make minor mod­i­fi­ca­tions as required accordingly.

Some of those projects might even feed back into the project, which would be a bonus — but even if they come to noth­ing, it’s worth­while for skills devel­op­ment alone.