In the battle against the Great Satan, another blow has been struck.

Yes, Bill Gates has lost another sucker. My desktop is now pure Ubuntu Linux. Not completely on purpose, mind you, but nonetheless happily.

About a year ago, I tried to make my PC a dual-boot system by installing Debian Linux (Ubuntu is based on Debian). I encountered a problem trying to partition my disk, and didn’t find a way around it.

This time, headed for the same goal, I met a somewhat similar problem. Last time the partition manager wouldn’t partition; this time there were two extra partitions that I didn’t recognize. One was small, about 30 megs, at the beginning of the disk; the other was about five or six gigs, which appeared in the defragmenter to be an unmovable file. This sounds suspicious to me: how did I get a partition in the middle of the disk, and what the hell’s on it? I couldn’t see it with Windows Explorer or in Command Prompt.

Well, while pondering this question, I decided to put in my new Linux partition, which worked fine but left two portions of the disk marked Unusable from the partition manager’s viewpoint. In trying to fix that, I did the right thing to the wrong partition, and destroyed my XP installation.

Of course I’d backed up all my data (except, as it turns out, my .emacs file and my Opera bookmarks, reasonable copies of which were on my laptop). I didn’t lose anything but a few minor changes I made in the day between backing up and screwing up, and I remember them. But, given the way Microsoft has chosen to distribute their massively expensive (they make 80% profit margins on Windows and Office) and massively flakey software, Dell doesn’t ship a Windows CD with its new machines. I’ve bought three computers in the last two years, and none have come with CDs to re-install Windows. I went to the Dell website to see if there was any information about reinstallation that might help; but to get any serious answers, I’d have to pay them.

The funny thing is, once I wiped out XP, everything was a snap. From the time I realized I’d dumped XP, through the install of Ubuntu, to the moment I was on the net running Firefox (the default browser on Ubuntu) and downloading Opera was about an hour. I took all the defaults; they all worked; the system started up immediately, and read my NTFS files on the external disk. The Ubuntu distribution comes with media tools, office programs (OpenOffice, which reads and writes MS-compatible files as well as many other formats), The GIMP (a Photoshop-like program), and lots of other stuff.

They fit this whole thing on a single CD, usable on most Intel 386-style computers (and the same applies for other architectures). Many computers will run Ubuntu from the live CD without installing the OS. Mine wouldn’t, so I had to download the alternate CD, which is just like the live CD except it doesn’t try to boot. The system will supposedly fit into an area as small as three gigs, but ten gigs is recommended for actual use. How much space does Windows take up on your computer (if you’re using it)? That’s why it’s so slow.

Caveats: in general, fancy graphical stuff looks like it’ll require some configuration. Flash doesn’t yet work on Linux Opera, though they say it’s fine in Firefox; I haven’t checked. Some people would consider that a limitation, others a blessing. I had to download MP3 software separately for copyright reasons, but that was trivial, and everything worked well. I especially like my new media player, called Amarok. Its music functionality is about equivalent to WinAmp, except for the visualizations.

Speaking of which, Ubuntu is a configurator’s dream. You can configure damn near everything, and the options, unlike many MS tricks, both work and make sense.

Of course no package on a single CD can include everything you might want. But with Ubuntu you get software to find and obtain packages of useful stuff. Apparently there are fancy package managers out there, but at this point I’m still using Syntaptic, which comes with Ubuntu. This program searches Ubuntu repositories for whatever you ask, then downloads and installs it. The whole system is amazingly simple to use compared to the installation packages on Windows. Just to have a single place to go when you’re looking for something to begin with is a big change.

Then there’s the fact that the stuff you’re downloading is free.

There’s lots more to say about Ubuntu, and I’ll probably be saying it in the next few days. But mainly I want to say that, once I screwed up and had to start from scratch, it was only about two hours before I was thinking, Damn, that might have been a good move on my part. I spent two days learning to make a dual-boot system, and half a day actually making a single-boot. And compared to XP, Ubuntu is blazingly fast. Everything hops, and I’m running many of the same programs (Opera, Emacs, Scid).

Oh yeah, one more thing. If you’re thinking of converting, spend an hour or two looking around the web for good places to get help beforehand; you’re likely to need it at some point, and it’ll save you time. My experience has been great with getting help. This morning I was trying to figure out the right way to hot-swap my external drive between my XP laptop and my Ubuntu desktop. I asked the original question last night; this morning there was an answer. I had two follow-ons, both of which were answered in less than 30 minutes, and within a little more than an hour we’d solved the problem. Again, a community effort, not a means of enriching a small number of persons of questionable moral character.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at June 26, 2007 08:00 PM

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