My inlaws were in town over break, and sleeping in our office, so I was without my PC. What is a geek to do? Take a four year old laptop downstairs and install Ubuntu (Linux) and use the desparation for diversion to fight through the install process and get the thing to work. How did it go? Keep reading....
Actually, pretty flawlessly, thanks to a helpful and readily available open source community, but I'm not ready to part with MacOS anytime soon. And before I start, a disclaimer - I am a techie person, but I've never even launched a program on a linux box before. Okay, one on a server, but that's it. Any complaints I have, I'm sure are because of my inexperience, but are also made from the perspective of a relatively tech-savvy newbie.
Step 1: Before the relatives came, I downloaded an iso image of "Gutsy Gibbon" (Ubuntu 7.10) from here. It took an afternoon to download 700MB, so if anyone wants a copy, let me know. MacOS comes in handy here, because it's blindingly easy to take an .iso image and turn it into a CD, where in Windows, I never succesfully managed it. I took the burned CD and put it with my laptop, so I'd be at the ready for when the conversation turned to golfing and the latest sales at Kohl's.
Step 2: My old XP install had surprisingly lasted the entire life of my laptop without re-install, but it was definitely showing its age. Having removed any personal data long ago, I took the plunge when there was a good lull in the holiday cheer, set the BIOS to boot from CD, and set the gutsy gibbon to work.
Step 3: I'd go through the install with you, but there wasn't a lot that I remember. It just did its thing, standard kind of prompting you'd expect from any consumer OS. Took about half an hour, I think?
And that was about it. It came with Open Office, so I was covered on the whole productivity suite. (Including, at first blush, a fairly impressive clone of Access.) The GIMP was there, so no Photoshop required. Mozilla Firefox was included as a web browser - I installed Opera as a free backup.
The big hangup was getting my wireless card to work. The gutsy gibbon claimed that my firmware was proprietary and I was out of luck. However, some general searching on Google uncovered some software that could take your existing drivers and extract the necessary data to make the hardware work. This was a little scary - I was entering in commands at the shell that I was unclear on, but when I finally was able to follow the steps to the letter, I was in.
So.... after a few days of playing around, here are my likes and dislikes:
Dislike - Boot time. Yuck-o. Maybe it's just my laptop, but it takes three times as long to boot into Ubuntu than WindowsXP. However, this is mitigated by the fact that once I'm in on Ubuntu, I'm in, where WindowsXP would then trail off in registry hell as it tried to navigate through a minefield of semi-uninstalled software, and it would be a good minute before I could do anything useful anyway.
Like - Installing software. Ubuntu has an Add/Remove programs that is actually what it is, ADD and remove programs. You can download anything to your hearts content from various repositories right from the operating system. I learned about this setup through troubleshooting my wireless card and grew to like this system a lot - more so than hunting things down on Windows and Mac.
Like - GUI interface on top of linux. I learn through doing, and the GUI is already helping me learn linux, but it doesn't totally hide the meat of the operating system, like WindowsXP and even Mac do, or barely cover it like Windows 3.1 or 95 did. It reminds me of the good old days of the Commodore Amiga, where the command prompt and GUI worked hand in hand to create a vibrant OS.
Dislike - Reinventing the wheel on the web. Nothing like an alternate OS to make you miss the seamless interaction of the relatively seamless network of plugins that make up web browsing. Yeah, web programmers write for the 95% of users who run Windows, 85% of whom run IE. But, it's annoying to be constantly reminded that you're swimming upstream. Even the act of watching a DVD sent groans through me as the OS demanded the appropriate codex.... You get what you pay for.
Like - Felt rock solid - a similar feel to MacOS. Windows has a feel to it when you're using it, like you're just waiting for the next system crash, or the next inexplicable wait while the hard drive goes off and does something random.
Result - A nice alternative for a second computer, and a cheap way to reuse Wintel gear for free. Would I go with it for something mission critical? Not yet. Would I choose it if MacOS has died in the nineties like everyone thought it would. You bet. The Ramsey family is down to one WindowsPC, with a third iMac already picked out to replace it. You can keep fighting with Windows with the unwashed hordes if you want, but now there's another reason to ditch decrepit Windows before they force you into Vista.