Developer Preview 1

[Richmond]

6.5.0 dp1 is, very much, a Developer Preview, and one should have no 
illusions about that.

I run Linux (UbuntuStudio 13.04) at home with the xfce 4.10 Window 
manager on top, and beyond the drag-&-drop and double-clicking being
non-functional 6.5.0 is not that bad.

Yesterday, for some quite inexplicable reason (I'm obviously clean 
gyte), I tried 6.5.0 dp1 at my school on a Linux box running
GNOME 3 Classic (Ubuntu 12.04), and the installer crashed the system 
(and crashing Linux takes quite a lot of work); after starting up, the 
checkbox for accepting the end-user licence was not visible, and on 
clicking 'next' the whole system ground to a halt.

I swapped over to xfce and installed the thing without a hitch.

I have not had the time to try 6.5.0 out on either Macintosh or Windows: 
something I would like to try and find the time to do
this coming weekend if I am not pre-empted (hint, hint, RunRev!) by a 
dp2 release and the mysterious 6.1.2 (further hints).

Although, come to think of things, I wonder what the point of a 6.1.2 
release is (Ben???), when that stuff can just be rolled into 6.5.0.

My normal test routine goes like this:

UbuntuStudio 13.04
Mac 10.4
Mac 10.6
Win XP
Win 7
Win 8.1

( All stand and piously repeat "Thank the Lord for VMware Player 6" )

sometimes (such as yesterday) I "get gyte" and try the latest release 
out on other systems.

--------- largely irrelevant stuff follows --------

having said all that, I have just returned an iMac G3 slot-loader that 
did 8 years sterling service in my school on Mac 10.4
to Mac OS 9.2.2 (and now loaded with Hypercard, Metacard 2.4 and RunRev 
(aka Livecard) 2.0) and taken it home: I had forgotten
some of the rather positive points of running 9.2.2 with 384 MB RAM and 
a 600 MHz PPC processor (with Classilla for web-browsing).

This is part of a project to resurrect my Powerbook 180 that really took 
off when I managed to get the right type of SCSI cable
(searching for that baby since 1999) to connect up to my ZIP drive.

---------- end of morning wibble ---------

Certainly, at the moment, I have not told any of my programming kids to 
upgrade beyond 6.1.0, and will not
until 6.5 "pulls itself together". My programming kids have computers 
running a range of systems running
from Xubuntu 13.04, UbuntuStudio 13.04 through Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

Richmond.