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Another encounter with Ubuntu

A few months ago I wrote of my mixed feelings after installing Ubuntu Linux as the sole desktop OS on a PC.

Over the weekend I did it again and this time the results were much better.

A kind reader rolled up at my doorstep late last week with an aging but functional Celeron 600-based computer with a hefty 512MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive. This "lightweight" piece of hardware would never have coped with any half-useful version of Windows, but that didn't matter because I'd decided to build a Linux box for day-to-day web use.

So I set about installing the latest version of Ubuntu with some sense of urgency, as the reset switch on my other computer is almost worn out from excessive use after dealing to the now very regular lockups that have started to become a part of life.

I must admit that I approached the installation with a degree of trepidation, given the difficulties I had getting the network side of things working on the missus's machine.

The first attempt at an install failed with an error message that informed me that it either unable to read critical files from the CDROM or write them to the hard drive.

Well which was it?

Was the CD drive having problems or was the hard-drive about to die?

No clues other than the suggestion that I burn my CDR at a lower speed -- which I did.

That didn't help -- so I was fearing the worst.

I tried swapping the CDROM from my other PC but (despite taking great care to ensure that the jumpers were set correctly) -- it wouldn't boot at all then.

The original drive went back in and I opted to try and run Ubuntu from the CD without installing first.

Low and behold, that worked just fine and left me fearing that the hard drive might be flaky.

But, just on a whim, I opted to install by double-clicking the "install" icon. Low and behold, everything went fine and dandy.

Perhaps the Ubuntu people need to check out why the install will sometimes fail when chosen from the boot menu while it works just fine if you opt to run from the CD first.

Everything was going just fine -- but the ancient onboard video seemed to be giving some grief. The region around the cursor would not refresh accurately and after a bit of moving and clicking the screen looked like a mess -- filled with small tiles, each slightly offset.

It seems that some advanced video functions are enabled by default -- so I turned them off and sanity returned to the display. It might be a smart idea to default an installation to the safest/most-basic configuration and allow people to turn these things *on* rather than off.

There's still something not quite right with the video side of things though because during boot-up and shutdown the screen flashes all sorts of random black and white blocks -- but that doesn't affect normal use.

Once everything was installed and the video sorted, I was quite impressed. Not only did it all now work "as advertised" but it wasn't the huge bowl of frozen treacle I expected from a performance perspective. It's actually quite usable (although you aren't going to be watching any YouTube videos on something this slow).

Just for fun, I thought I might install Apache and an FTP server.

What happened next was a real surprise and perhaps demonstrates why Linux is far more popular as a server than a desktop OS.

Dropping to a shell (goodbye noobys!) I whacked in a couple of install commands prefixed buy "sudo" to give me the required permissions and bingo -- all done!

I was impressed by how the system did a self-scan to work out what was needed and (I assume) to check for version dependencies) then rushed off to someplace on the net and downloaded the required files. What's more, without any extra effort on my part, it installed those files, set up a default configuration and began running the web-server and ftp servers.

Just a few tweaks to the config files and a restart was all it took to get myself a fully working web/FTP server. I did the same to install Perl.

Now I'm getting enthusiastic about Ubuntu Linux.

So, the immediate threat to my daily publication schedules is averted and I'm most happy with my new setup (although I do notice this morning that it *is* quite slow when compared to the previous XP box I was running and I've had to change editors, FTP clients etc).

I still have to set up email and trawl through my notebook of a million passwords to re-establish the auto-logins I use on dozens of websites, but at least I'll now be able to get rid of this callous on my reset finger.

My second Ubuntu experience, although not perfect, was certainly a lot less painful than my first. It's a shame however, that they didn't do just a little more polishing to fix some glaringly obvious issues that would have taken it that extra 1%. Maybe next time.

So now I'm wondering... how many Aardvark readers who have old PCs sitting around gathering dust since they bough their new uber-hertz tera-byte machine have bothered to check out the Linux alternative?

Is Linux one of those things you've always meant to have a play with but never gotten around to or been put off by the horror tales?

Well download the latest Ubuntu and give it a go. You might be surprised.

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