A simple — and importantly, public — interest metric that I’ve enjoyed in the past is Google Trends, and in particular, building a comparison between the major distros. It gives you a nice feel for the history of Ubuntu releases, press coverage and growing interest in the platform.

In terms of past performance, 7.10 and 9.10 have enjoyed the biggest spikes (against background noise of the time), while 8.04 LTS and 9.10 look pretty even as the highest peaks. It’s encouraging to see that 9.10 did so well.

But I wonder… how “big” will the 10.04 LTS release be? How much interest will it generate? How will the search and news spikes compare to previous releases?

Canonical has every reason to roll out the red carpet for this release, making a big deal of the release itself (Long Term Support, headline features, new theme and branding), launching new services (such as Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud support and the Ubuntu One music store), complementary announcements from partners, etc.

So… How big do you think the 10.04 LTS spike will be? Lay your bets in the comments. Just name a multiplier against the 7.04 spike — sitting at an even 2.0 on the search volume chart above — and by July we’ll see who nailed it!

Update: Fixed the Red Hat chart, thanks to David in the comments.

* They’re doing stupid shit with GNOME again, but they’ll grow out of the “differentiation means dicking with everything”, “design by finger-painting fiat” and “working with upstream is hard, let’s go shopping” stuff eventually. If Red Hat can see the light, surely Canonical can.

I filed a bug and test case regarding the problem (which will hopefully be be fixed with an official update, given that Hardy is an LTS release), but here’s a quick guide to work around the problem in the mean time. Thanks to Andrew “ajmitch” Mitchell for pointing me in the right direction!

1. Grab and unpack the timezonedb extension tarball from PECL.
2. apt-get install php5-dev
3. phpize
4. ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5
5. make
6. sudo cp modules/timezonedb.so /usr/lib/php5/20060613/
   Note: The precise name of the final directory might be different. For instance, on hardy-i386 it will be 20060613+lfs.
7. sudo vi /etc/php/conf.d/timezonedb.ini
Yes, this is a new file. Content: extension=timezonedb.so
8. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Now your PHP has the very latest timezone data up its sleeve, so you can rest easy knowing that your web visitors won’t think you’re a Queenslander.

Zing!

Update: The php5-timezonedb extension was added to Debian, but removed from intrepid… seems it was because intrepid’s php5 has a patch to use the system tzdata. It would be awesome to get that patch into hardy!

Update: Uh, what about make…?

While the packages were downloading, I noticed a few coming from universe, but fewer than I had expected. I try not to use universe stuff on my mission-critical server, but some things are just too good to live without. Perhaps they’re candidates for main inclusion?

So, here’s some of the universe stuff I can’t live without on my server, excluding supporting libraries:

• collectd: Totally awesome “just works” system information collection and graphing tool. No more dicking around with nightmare configuration of Cacti and friends — collectd comes with a bunch of useful and sensible plugins that are ready-to-go for common graphing tasks. collectd has a vote of confidence from the Red Hat Emerging Technology folks, so you know it’s good.
• libapache2-redirtoservname: Convenience module for making sure you’re always redirecting to the primary domain name for your websites — with only one line in your VirtualHost configuration. Here’s how easy it is to use:

  ServerName bethesignal.org
  ServerAlias www.bethesignal.org perkypants.org www.perkypants.org
  RedirectToServerName On

• rtorrent: Simply the best terminal-based torrent client.
• php5-xcache: Opcode caching for PHP. Handy when running lots of PHP gash.
• mailgraph: Lets me know how much spam I’m killing, and email I’m suffering. See mailgraph on gnome.org for a great example of mailgraph in action.