Apologies to regular readers: the last few weeks have been unusually busy, and I haven't had the time to update this site as regularly as I would like.

And now a small rant. I have an older computer in my amateur radio "shack," which I use for that hobby. It's a "middleweight" computer on which I installed Ubuntu 7.10 a while back. (It doesn't have enough RAM for Ubuntu 8.x, which was the occasion of a previous rant.)

Last night I was using that computer and found the need to load a second web browser. The text-based Lynx would have been fine, but I wasn't choosy. I went to the repository manager ("Add/Remove Programs"), selected a likely candidate, and tried to install...and was rudely informed that I couldn't. The program repository is no longer functioning.

Now, I've grumbled before about the pressure to continually upgrade to newer and later distro releases. If you want to get the newest applications, or the newest versions, you'll only find them in the repository for the latest release. No one wants to "back-port," say, the new Firefox 3.0 to the very old Debian 3.0. ("Back-porting" refers to compiling an application to run on an no-longer-current release of the operating system.)

But at least the old repositories are still there. I may not be able to find 2009-vintage applications for my 2004-vintage Linux, but at least I could still obtain the 2004-vintage applications.

Not so, it would appear, with Ubuntu. They've closed down the 7.x repositories. So the only way I could install even an old application would be to compile it from source code....and since I didn't bother to install the GCC compiler when the repository was available, that option is closed too.

It's not a crisis; I'll just install a new distro on that computer. Not Ubuntu. And while I might still recommend Ubuntu to newcomers, for anyone who wants a stable and long-lasting operating system, I'll recommend something else.