Ubuntu 8.04
A couple of years ago I had a spare PC sat doing nothing. At that time I decided to install Ubuntu Warty Warthog on the machine and have a play with it.
Unfortunately, I ran out of patience with the OS. Having always been Windows based, the switch to Linux was just too much. Trying to figure out how to get the audio running, get the machine to display in widescreen, get the wireless working – it just wasn’t friendly enough for me to achieve it and I gave up.
Since then, every so often I have tried to have a play with Ubuntu as a new version came out. I tried to install it on my laptop, but with only 128mb installed and no capability for upgrades, I failed miserably. Reading Donncha’s post about updating Ubuntu to 8.04 Hardy Heron reminded me that I have a spare machine in the garage.
Well, it’s a spare machine no more. With no more than a little grumping from my boss, the PC is now in the lounge, running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.
The system automatically detected my sound card, wireless network card, video card, wired network card and everything else I would expect it to. The actual install was so much more simple than the previous attempts I’d had too, taking just over 20 minutes to install on an Athlon XP 2800 with 512mb RAM.
I had huge issues with trying to get on the ‘net. After much searching and believing it was a problem with the install, I remembered that I have mac address filtering set on my router. I added the mac addresses of both NICs to the router and voila!
I haven’t played much yet, although Already I am loving “GIMP”, a pre-installed open source image editing application (similar to Photoshop but free!). The above image was created using “take screenshot” (Applications > Accessories > Take Screenshot) and resized simply and quickly using GIMP.
I guess it’s the closest I’m gonna get to a Mac for the foreseeable future so I will keep playing and let y’all know how I get on.
If you use Ubuntu, please give me some suggestions for interesting stuff I can do with it, otherwise it’s mostly gonna be used for surfing (using Firefox 3, beta 5 which also came pre-installed).
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