Where Are The Wise Men?

Through some crazy circumstance, a friend of mine was given some Ubuntu Linux CD’s and didn’t know what they were. Of course, my home computer went south and the easiest method was to just reinstall it — my Gentoo install was old and crusty and needed to be to redone or replaced (this is probably what caused the “going south” part).

So I went over to his house and got the CD’s last night. When I got home, I put the Install CD in, and went upstairs. I did a little babysitting before I went to bed, but not much — just telling it what the main use account will be and etc.

This morning the machine was up and going. I had to do a little configuration (it didn’t have Emacs installed!). Here are some random thoughts about the whole thing:

• It did the most important thing — it left my data drives alone. On this machine, I have a main drive, and two data drive. I reformatted my main drive but did nothing to my other drives. So now I have all my old data and configs!
• Installation was dead-easy. It found all my hardware without any trying — including my on-board soundcard, which I could never get to work in Gentoo
• It was the easiest printer installation I’ve ever experienced — in any OS! I started gnome-printer, selected “New Printer”, and it figured out my HP, the model, and what driver to use. Getting a printer to work is usually a battle for me, so I was very surprised by this.
• The anti-aliasing font setup is superb.
• FireFox is at 1.0.7 — a bit older than the new 1.5. But I’m learning to deal.
• Installing Emacs was a bigger chore than it should have been — I did a apt-get install emacs and it didn’t find it. I google for a while and finally figured out I needed to do a apt-get install emacs21. Grrr.
• Did I mention I love the default fonts? Especially the one on the terminal, for some reason.
• It seems that MPlayer is not available, no matter what kind of apt-getenchantation you try. I seem to have to compile that myself.

Overall, I’m very impressed! We’ll see how it weathers my daily usage (insert evil laughter . .. )

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 9:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.