Ubuntu rocks!
Due to a little accident, my wife’s standard laptop is hors de combat — basically, I dropped our son on it (from a small height, I hasten to add) and the power connection broke. So it boots, for about 5 seconds, before discovering that the battery is flatter than Kansas.
I have in my possession an elderly laptop with no more than 256M of RAM, much too little to run a modern Microsoft OS. So I decided to check Ubuntu out. This is supposed to be “Linux for human beings”, so I figured this would be OK for non-geeks.
I downloaded an install CD via BitTorrent and used it to install it. The installation went really well. I had to fight my old-skool Debian and OpenBSD instincts and just let things go as designed. Ubuntu has made a great product — it installed seamlessly on the lappy and presented a clean, workable graphical interface that I think will be acceptable for Linux-o-phobes.
The only thing that didn’t work out of the box was the wi-fi pc-card I bought expressedly for its OpenBSD compatibility. However, I discovered that I had no less than four wi-fi cards lying around, and the oldest 3Com card worked fine.
I’ve been using this laptop all day (in between re-stacking our woodpile) and I really enjoy it. Small stuff, like Alt-Tab window-switching and Alt-F4 window close work exactly like in Windows. But having a real Debian system underneath just feels sooo much better than Windows crap leavened with Cygwin goodness.
Posted at 17:05,
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