Karmic Koala Ubuntu
I installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) this morning. No half measures. No dual booting. Following a backup of precious artefacts, its a complete install, usurping XP as the sole operating system on the Precision M90. I considered Windows 7, but it's 180UKP for the upgrade I'm after. If I'm going to spend that sort of money, I'd rather spend a bit more and get an entire new lappy. Windows 7 pre-installed, naturally. Still, that's enough about Windows. Let's talk Linux.
Installation went very smoothly. A console boot screen allows you to set your language and keymap before you even make the fateful decision to install. These options are provided again when you hit the graphical part of the install process, along with a nifty time-zone selector. Once you've decided how much of your hard drive you'd like to devote to Ubuntu, the installation proceeds accordingly. In my case, I gave the entire drive - but this machine used to dual-boot Linux and XP just fine.
The file copy process is the longest part of the install, with Ubuntu flashing OS features at you during the process. It finished up in less than half an hour. Very first impressions were ok, but not as flashy as I'd like. However, Ubuntu tells me that I can get better graphical fidelity if I download a proprietary driver. I'm ok with that, so a quick download, install and reboot later - we're back - and we're looking spanky.
I never installed Vista, so the jump from XP to Ubuntu was something of a giant leap. The taskbar is very functional, even compared to XP. The rest of the OS shimmers. Browsing is a delight due to some beautiful anti-aliasing, which I would actually rate above Mac OS X. Just as smooth but not as heavy. Gentle gradients seem to constitute most of the GUI's look and feel.
I did have some initial problems with Wireless. There was no indication that a card was present, and no auto-scanning for networks occurred. I ended up having to manually enter the SSID, and even then I had to resort to setting all the IP4 settings manually. No problem at all with a wired connection, which came in handy as I desperately Google'd for answers.
Another immediate proprietary install was Adobe Flash player, which happily launched a game of Zynga Poker within Firefox. Sound worked out of the box, although it doesn't seem to get the same quality of sound out of my laptop speakers as XP managed. Sounds fine when connected to speakers, tho'. I had to download quite a few plugins to get all of my formats to play, but this took less than ten minutes to accomplish. Rhythmbox, the pre-installed music player, doesn't look as good as iTunes, but then, if you're spending your life looking at iTunes, you probably need a new hobby anyway.
Overall though, I'm genuinely excited to be playing around with a new OS, even if it is one I've encountered before. Despite the initial problems, everything is running lovely now. Desktop Linux has definitely come a long way.
Installation went very smoothly. A console boot screen allows you to set your language and keymap before you even make the fateful decision to install. These options are provided again when you hit the graphical part of the install process, along with a nifty time-zone selector. Once you've decided how much of your hard drive you'd like to devote to Ubuntu, the installation proceeds accordingly. In my case, I gave the entire drive - but this machine used to dual-boot Linux and XP just fine.
The file copy process is the longest part of the install, with Ubuntu flashing OS features at you during the process. It finished up in less than half an hour. Very first impressions were ok, but not as flashy as I'd like. However, Ubuntu tells me that I can get better graphical fidelity if I download a proprietary driver. I'm ok with that, so a quick download, install and reboot later - we're back - and we're looking spanky.
I never installed Vista, so the jump from XP to Ubuntu was something of a giant leap. The taskbar is very functional, even compared to XP. The rest of the OS shimmers. Browsing is a delight due to some beautiful anti-aliasing, which I would actually rate above Mac OS X. Just as smooth but not as heavy. Gentle gradients seem to constitute most of the GUI's look and feel.
I did have some initial problems with Wireless. There was no indication that a card was present, and no auto-scanning for networks occurred. I ended up having to manually enter the SSID, and even then I had to resort to setting all the IP4 settings manually. No problem at all with a wired connection, which came in handy as I desperately Google'd for answers.
Another immediate proprietary install was Adobe Flash player, which happily launched a game of Zynga Poker within Firefox. Sound worked out of the box, although it doesn't seem to get the same quality of sound out of my laptop speakers as XP managed. Sounds fine when connected to speakers, tho'. I had to download quite a few plugins to get all of my formats to play, but this took less than ten minutes to accomplish. Rhythmbox, the pre-installed music player, doesn't look as good as iTunes, but then, if you're spending your life looking at iTunes, you probably need a new hobby anyway.
Overall though, I'm genuinely excited to be playing around with a new OS, even if it is one I've encountered before. Despite the initial problems, everything is running lovely now. Desktop Linux has definitely come a long way.
posted by The Pap @ 5:23 pm
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