We always try to design things so they are cross browser compatible and that things work and look the same for all user no matter what version or operating system they are using.

We encountered a problem recently with a site not rendering correctly in IE6.0 - of course our dev guys fixed this right up but this inspired me to get some stats on just what browsers folks were using on our clients web sites. I took a peak at the analytics for this across a range of our clients that have significant traffic volumes (in excess of 1M visit per month) and a varied demographic user base across a range of industry sectors (Fashion, Retail and Transport) to make these stats work as ‘real’ averages.

It made interesting reading and I thought you might like to see the results.

Based on this data we have decided to rule out IE5.5 from any design/dev decisions going forwards. Sorry to any of you still using this, but there just aren’t enough of you out there to warrant the additional tests.

Having heard rave reviews of Ubuntu being a real alternative to Windows, I was keen to test this hypothesis out. I downloaded the latest server edition (7.04) and burned the ISO to a CD.

Installation was fine and completed but booting Ubuntu failed at the very start of the boot process just when “Starting …” is shown. The following dump is produced (or similar)

Int 14: CR2 f0000000 err 00000000 EIP c828c384 CS 000000060 flags 00010003
Stack: c007eb0 c83f129b c8371d8c 000000082 c00f7eb9 000f7eb8 00000000 00000000

I’ve read a great many posts about this issue. Suggestions have been made that

• It’s a dual boot issue
• It’s a laptop issue
• It’s a RAID disk issue
• It’s a video card driver issue
• It’s a BIOS issue
• It’s an incompatibility issue with the way the server edition kernel is compiled

Suggestions to fix the issue are also broad ranging from updating BIOS firmware to booting into recovery mode and twiddling with core system files.

Conclusion

If you have found this post hoping for a concrete answer then I don’t have it for you. The problem could be one in the list above or maybe another. Right now, it does not seem Ubuntu has addressed this explicitly despite the number of reports

However, one suggestion did work for me behind which I’ll throw my support.

Install the Ubuntu Alternative Desktop 7.04. This is available on the same Ubuntu download page as the server edition. You have to select the Desktop edition and then a checkbox indicating you want the alternative ISO. It weighs in a couple hundred megabytes heavier, but after installation I booted into Ubuntu no problems.

The server features I wanted; Apache, MySQL, PHP, I have added with XAMPP, though you could probably find the relevant packages in the package manager too.

I’ve been using Ubuntu for about a week now with no problems; wireless, mail, messaging, internet and so far the experience has been good.