24 -vs- Piano Cat
As I was sitting in bed tonite, I had the choice of watching “24″ with Jen — or watching this:
Ubuntu “Feisty Fawn” Installed
So I’ve been a pretty major “LinuxDork” ™ for going on 10 years. My typical ritual is to try to install it on an old desktop roughly every 12-18 months thinking that I can cut the cord from Windows and use it as my primary OS. It usually ends up being an exercise in futility…especially trying to get everything working on a modern laptop (wireless, 3D acceleration, power mgmt, etc).
So I’m pretty stoked that after almost 10 years of futzing with it, I have a fully-functional Linux desktop environment installed on my laptop. Start-to-Finish, total install/config time was about 3hrs. I’ve definitely spent that much (or more) setting up a windows box in the past. I might have spent an additional 1/2 hr doing research to make sure that my current laptop (Dell e1505) was a good candidate for Feisty.
I downloaded the ISO, burnt the CD, and let the default installer walk me through partitioning my HD, setting up dual-boot (automatically, sweet!), and other basic configuration settings.
After that, it was mostly an exercise in “apt-get’ing” most anything I needed. The wireless setup isn’t for the uninitiated, but it also wasn’t rocket science. I basically just followed the instructions verbatim from the following articles:
- http://home.concepts.nl/~bergmans/linux/install_linux.html
- http://yergler.net/Ubuntu_on_the_Inspiron_E1505
- http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092
- http://lunapark6.com/ubuntu-704-feisty-fawn.html
- http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/HowToMountsmbfsSharesPermanently
After the above was said and done, all I had to do was install some Firefox plugins and I was set. The beautiful thing about all of this is that everything basically “just works”, which is unbelievably cool if you’ve ever spent much time with computers.
If you’re a developer, OS enthusiast, or just someone who is tired of Windows/Scared of Vista - but doesn’t want to go Mac - Linux (Ubuntu in particular) might just be what you’re looking for.