Ubuntu 8.04

Over the past weekend, in addition to seeing Hellboy II and catching up with the first season of the X-Files and getting back to the gym, I decided to install Ubuntu on my machine. I recently purchased a larger hard drive, and wanted to repartition my system. I ended setting up an 80GB XP disk and a 30GB Ubuntu disk, just to see what this new version of Linux was like. My last foray with Linux was more than a decade and change ago, when I tried installing Red Hat 4.1 on my then, top of the line, Dell box. That experience was fraught with frustration, as I battled endlessly to get a network card to work, and unsuccessfully getting X windows and Gnome, or even KDE to boot.

My experience with Ubuntu was less than troublesome. I had heard good things about Ubuntu, and I don't have as much free time as I'd like to experiment with different flavors of Linux, so I settled with it. I installed it from within Windows (instead of straight from CD), and it recognized every piece of hardware that I had in my machine, without even prompting me! It set me up on my internal DHCP network, downloaded all the updates, and I was surfing with Firefox and Opera before you'd know it. It was EASIER to run the Ubuntu install program than XP. What a change from a decade and a half ago! All my music and video files can wonderfully, and package system is a breeze to update software with. After fiddling around with it for a day or so, I installed the Compiz FX kit, which basically adds some sweet visual effects to the windows and desktops of Gnome, and it's slick. Really Slick. Useability is through the roof. I can read all my PDFs, movies, images, my TTF fonts, MS Word docs and spreadsheets. It's great. Unfortunately I don't think I can stick with Ubuntu on its own, as I still need Premiere and Photoshop to do editing and painting work. But for general day to day surfing, document editing, movie watching and the like, it's a great OS. I'd love to be able to get my parents hooked on it!