Ubuntu

I recently downloaded the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, and seeing the event log messages yesterday claiming I was low on disk space (a mere 5 GB free!) reminded me I needed to burn a CD.  Never used an ISO before, but it was simple enough to tell Nero that’s what it was doing.

I don’t have a machine handy to install it for real yet, but you can boot and run Ubuntu right from the CD.  It’s quite cool, worked like a charm on my P3 1 GHz computer, but was kind of slow.  Probably a matter of RAM.  It recognized everything fine, and could access the external hard drive, but not the primary hard drive.

The CD boot capability intrigued me in part because I watched someone at my parts vendor diagnose a corrupt hard drive boot sector using a different Linux (Knoppix, I believe), and that’s just cool.

I have available, or coming available, a ton of computers I can hang onto if I wish, ranging from P60 and P100 machines that are pretty much throw-aways to P3 450 machines, and some various parts up through some of what was in a P4 2.4 GHz with a probably bad motherboard.  That and I should be able to afford my next computer, well, pretty much any time now.  Apparently I need more than a 57 GB hard drive.  Anyway, with the old machines, the 450 boxes anyway, I ought to be able to experiment with Linux, even if I don’t dual boot it on the new machine, or the 1.8 I pretty much have parts to cobble together.

But I digress.

Linux is really getting there, as far as being able to sit a novice down at it and say “here are your applications, your games, your web browser, change your background picture this way, and see here are some other things you can do” and let them just go at it.  My mother could do that as readily as she could learn to get around Windows XP and some apps installed on or available with it.

Posted by on 12/16 at 10:31 AM

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