Freelance Web Design & Development

Yesterday I installed Gutsy Gibbon on my boyfriend’s Dell laptop (the Inspiron 9200). I continue to be amazed at how smoothly Ubuntu installations run; wireless (!!!) and printing worked out of the box. The one weird glitch is that at bootup, after the phrase “Starting up…” appears, the load hangs with a blank screen — until you press Ctl-Alt-F2. No idea why, but I’ll keep tinkering.

I also recently switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu on my main desktop workstation, after using Gentoo as my primary operating system for about a year. I picked Gentoo (with fluxbox!) initially because I wanted to start from scratch, know everything on my system, and gain the knowledge and experience that would come from compiling and installing everything myself. And I did — but now I’m ready for a setup where, when I plug in my digital camera, I’m prompted to download pictures instead of digging around in /dev/ looking for the device. I know that if I want to install/uninstall/tweak/configure anything, I have the freedom to do so — the freedom of the GPL!
When I initially put the Ubuntu live disk into my desktop, I was booted into busybox (initramfs) rather than the Ubuntu desktop; the fix was to press F6 at the boot menu and edit the boot parameters (if I recall correctly, add ‘all_generic_ide’ before the ‘–’). After that, everything installed smoothly — I was able to put the existing contents of my hard drive in a new partition, which is now my dedicated /home partition.

This is my third recent Ubuntu installation — at Christmas I installed it on my mom’s Dell Vostro (dual-booting with XP — I love that the installation disk makes it easy to keep your Windows installation as-is). That needed some configuration for the wireless card, but other than that everything was simple to get set up.

Since last year’s Feisty (which I installed on my (now-defunct) iBook, after dual-booting Edgy and OSX) I’ve been totally psyched about Ubuntu; its out-of-the-box settings and programs, for ease of use, sane defaults, configurability, etc top any proprietary system I’ve used. Hardware support isn’t consistent enough for the non-technical user to be able to install it on their own; but non-technical users rarely install their own systems, proprietary or free. Once it’s set up, the modern Ubuntu distribution strikes the perfect balance of ease-of-use and workability (as good as or better than Windows or OSX) and configurability (potentially infinite, as with any GPL’d product!), perfect for any level of user.