Skip to main content

Ubuntu






This is the first post I've ever written from a Linux OS. To be honest, I never thought I would ever make one. But, just on spec, today I took an old laptop I use occasionally, and installed the latest version of Ubuntu.

The whole installation process took me less than twenty minutes, and you know what? Everything I thought about Linux is wrong. This machine (a Sony Vaio P3 with 512 mg RAM) has a few weird components in it - I assumed that I would have to screw around and look for mouse drivers and do lots of command line typey-typey stuff. Ring up Stilly and ask him what the 'secret word' was to unpack a tarball kind of magic But nope - nothing.

Everything just worked.

Wireless, USB, Graphics, sound, all drives - everything. No hassle. And it looks brilliant! Kind of like a cross between Vista and OSX. Easy. Intuitive. And fast, too. This old machine performs brilliantly - better than it ever ran any version of windows.

And because nearly all my stuff (bookmarks, mail, documents, feeds) are all online and browser based, I haven't had to install or restore anything from backup. My world came with me. It's really never been easier to switch your OS.

Microsoft lost an awful lot when they lost the API war.

And I'm sure they couldn't really care less, but it looks like they've lost me, too.

Comments

  1. Anonymous7:07 pm

    Congratulations on making the switch - so many people are these days!

    Ubuntu is a great Linux distribution with a great community - pop over to www.ubuntuforums.org for some friendly advice. The next version of Ubuntu, "Fesity Fawn", will include fancy graphics much like Vista and OSX in the form of Compix (www.go-compiz.org).

    Enjoy your time using Ubuntu and be sure to explore its many strengths!

    Jon Cooper - UK

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown10:22 am

    Hey Gordy, you should have asked, I would have told you!

    Linux is not too bad!

    It still has some room for imporovement and you'll probably find small problems over time, but it gets better all the time.

    I've been using it on my Toshiba Tecra 9000 laptop for a few years now and, to be honest I get a bit bored with the fact that I don't have to fiddle with stuff to make it work, and I very very rarely have to recover from crashes.

    I keep wanting to change to a different distro just to get have something to tinker with!

    Pepe

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going West vs Going to Sleep

Phew! That was one busy adventure to the other side of this wide brown land (It is wide, and brown, but mainly wide) TUF 2005 in Perth was the launching ground for our new product, ice. Stilly and I were presenting the keynote, which was based around showing off ice, and talking about collaboration and other reasons why a bunch of customers might want to buy it. In a stroke of genius\insanity, we decided to let the audience pick the demonstration platform based on random outcomes - we built a giant cardboard die with various operating systems and platforms written on each side - then we'd let a volunteer from the audience roll the dice(die?) to determine which platform we should do our demo on. ice (the italics belong to the marketing department) works on any platform, so we were pretty confident that we would be okay. But, what I hadn't counted on (those italics are mine), was my crummy laptop (which was acting as the server) deciding that it would be a good idea to hibernat...
2 comments
Read more

Still Crazy

When I started with TOWER Software four years ago, I was keen to get on with the job. You know, new project manager guy and all, trying to figure out what was what, and who was who. As part of this breaking-in process, I went around and asked each developer what they were working on, and how long they estimated that their current project would take. I'll admit that I had a secret agenda - it's important to find out who are the overly optimistic guys, and who are the more seasoned realists, because you're supposed to adjust your project schedules accordingly.. Anyway, I collected all this data and feed it into a secret Gantt chart I had somewhere. Most of the team were working on features that were being shipped in the next few months, and I got the broad range of overly positive responses, which is pretty common. I know I'm a terribly optimistic estimator. (Incidentally, if you're like me, my advice is to always multiply your estimate by the value of pi in order to ...
2 comments
Read more

The height of Retro cool?

Like Rory , I grew up with a lame arse PC. I too was bitterly jealous of those amiga owners. With their fancy fandanlged-hand-holding-a-floppy-disk bios, and versions of Marble Madness that looked just like the arcade, they had no idea how lucky they were. But, I'm not so sure that the grey box which evaporated my childhood, (while I'm very fond of it) was actually the height of eighties cool. In fact, the computer I owned was far, far worse than the virtual boy of PCs - something that made those poor betamax owners laugh themselves into hysterical coniptions as to what a loser of a product this thing actually was, and they paid 450 dollars for a flashing digital clock. My dad bought us a genuine, IBM PC-JX. The IBM PC-Jr is widely regarded as one of IBM's dumbest decisions. What very few know, is that after the IBM PC-Jr flopped dismally in the US, IBM was left with a bunch of leftover hardware that nobody wanted. I can hear the meetings now: shimmery dissolve in "Jo...
2 comments
Read more