Static's blog

Experiences with Linux (Part 1)

Yes, this is a post about Linux. Maybe some of you thought with all the Windows based posts before that I was a total MS fanboy, well then sorry to delude you.

My experiences with Linux now go back a couple of years. My interest in Linux or more specifically Ubuntu was sparked by a PCWorld article. It was a full blown article on how to go around installing Ubuntu. They usually don’t do articles on Linux and other open source stuff, so I that Ubuntu must be a damn good distro for PCWorld to recommend it and do an article on it.  So, I decided to go and ask Ubuntu for a disc. This disc arrived about 4 weeks later.

When I put in the installation disc and rebooted my computer, I was very excited and filled with anticipation. The installation went well, and I rebooted into..wait for it..a Ubuntu login screen.

I noticed that resolution was messed up, but that was to be expected. After I logged in, the first thing I did was check for updates. I ran into a small problem here. During the installation I chose Canada as my country. This cause my update download speed to be really really slow; the server really sucked (like 25 kb/s). I went to system preferences and changed my update server to the US one. Problem solved; downloads were going at maximum speed.

Downloading and installing those updates took some time, after I rebooted it asked me if I wanted to install restricted drivers (this means that the drivers aren’t open source i.e proprietary), I installed the NVIDIA driver. Another reboot my resolution problem was fixed; I saw Ubuntu in full 1440x900 glory.

First impressions

First, thing I noticed was the boot time (I had Vista at the time) Ubuntu loaded in about 30 seconds and was ready to go.

Now, since the resolution problem was fixed I took a closer look at the color scheme. I would like to say that I liked it but I didn’t, the brownish and orange tones weren’t really my thing. Even with all the problems that Vista caused, I must admit that it looked good.

It came preinstalled with Firefox, so no issues there. The media player Rhythmbox was great as well.

Bye..for now

After a week, I decided to get rid of my Ubuntu install. Why you may ask?

Reasoning:

• Tired of dual-booting
• Couldn’t run my Windows programs (I didn’t know about Wine until my next install)
• Games

So, Ubuntu was gone for now. It will come back in a month, but that’s a story for the next part of this 3 part story.

Do comment, I would love to hear if any of my readers experiences with Linux.