I've been browsing the various blog systems available.

I am setting up a blog for use by my brother and his wife; the subject matter will be their new baby. They want a very quick, easy and reliable way to post news about their baby as well as photographs with captions.

My brother is well versed in technology, but not in web development. His wife is comfortable using a computer, but is not well versed in the underlying technologies.

The platform is Linux/PHP/MySQL

I am looking for a freely available blog system that I can install to my server, that has a very good user-friendly interface and a very strong photo gallery system.

Required Features:
-Easy install on to a shared host
-Up to date (no dead or out-of-date blog scripts)
-XHTML/CSS compliant output
-Photo Gallery
-Appealing Look and Feel (skinnable is nice)
-Very user friendly
-Fast and reliable

I have browsed the popular ones at opensourcecms.com and currently am playing around with Serendipity as it seems to be a good one and very user friendly. I like that they have a "media" section where you can manipulate folders and images easily.

Any tips are appreciated, thanks.

Word Press (http://wordpress.org/) is a pretty good system. It supports uploading image and making thumbnails for them too.

I use wordpress as well and there are tons of great themes for it. Also they are lots of plugins for things like gallery, or even intergrating flickr into the blog so when you post a picture in flickr it updates your blog automatically. Its worth a look. I've also used P-machine, but I think wordpress beats that hands-down.