Productivity & Technology 08 Jul 2008 09:39 pm
Impressed with Ubuntu
I've been wanting to learn MySQL and PHP for a little while now, because I think it'll be useful in the coming months, so I decided that I should probably install Linux, rather than installing the two on Windows. (There's something about that that just feels wrong.) I have something I'm itching to build, and it's time to start picking up some new skills again. I've had a spare 500GB drive lying around for a couple of months, so I popped it in on July 4, downloaded Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, and installed the OS almost as a spur-of-the-moment thing.
I was amazed at how quickly and painlessly the OS installed. Back in 2001-2002, the last time I made a serious go of running Linux (Debian), it took almost 18 hours to get the OS installed and configured to the point where I could use X. It took a lot of help from the guys in #linux, too. I never would have been able to do it without their help.
But this time it was as easy as putting the CD in, booting from the optical drive, entering my desired username, password, and localization settings, and that was it. About 45 minutes later, I booted into Gnome, and had working sound and networking, right out of the box. I ran the GUI Update Manager, which found a proprietary display driver for my GeForce 8800 GT — in addition to other normal system updates — and a single restart later, I had graphics acceleration and an up-to-date OS installation.
Total time to working install: ~60 minutes, including software updates. It was faster and easier than installing XP, Vista, or Mac OS X Leopard, and by a significant margin. In terms of ease of installation, I would rank them in this order:
- Ubuntu 8.04
- Windows Vista
- Mac OS X
- Windows XP
I also installed the Redhat Liberation Fonts following the instructions here, and pretty soon, I had non-crappy looking fonts. (You'll have to change your system fonts in both Firefox and Ubuntu itself to use them before you'll notice a real difference.) While they're still not as nice as Windows or OS X, they're quite a bit better than what you get OOTB with Ubuntu. And I'm not even sure that they're *bad* per se. I think they're just different than what I'm used to.
That ended my adventures in Linux for a few days until tonight. I needed to get a significant amount of schoolwork done which unfortunately requires Internet Explorer. I'm pretty well caught up there, so I've been booted back into Linux for the past two hours or so. In that time, I've gotten my laser printer working using the generic PCL6 drivers with Foomatic/pxlmono. Print quality is great, and I can even configure the printer to print as "draft" quality without messing around. I couldn't even do that with OS X.
My only complaint so far as that when the machine is woken from sleep or hibernate, there is no sound. Apparently this is a common problem with a couple of possible solutions, but I have not felt any inclination to try any of them yet. Maybe in another couple of days or so.
Hopefully I will be booted into Linux for another couple of days before having to go back to Windows for any reason. Alas, I am unable to ditch Windows entirely as I do some pretty intricate page layouts and PDF conversions from within Word, but hopefully I can minimize the amount of time I spend there.
To figure out for the future, should time and attention span allow:
- iTunes replacement that can import old iTunes metadata
- Figure out these page layouts and PDF conversion in OpenOffice, if possible
- Get my Blu-ray player working, which should be possible with mplayer and some other tools
My main focus right now, though, is building my project, which has some very serious monetization possibilities. Now if only I can get someone else to answer his phone.
