OS Play Time

No politics, no rants, no foaming at the mouth with this post. Just a lil fun.

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Well, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” has been out for over a week now, and here at twc central, three Windows computers have had it installed… three different ways. The full install (partitioning off a chunck of one hard drive) went slick as goose grease. Nice looks, snappy performance.

Two “Wubi” (Windows-based Ubuntu Installer) installs. One was straight off the CD. (Note: for the one or two readers of twc that don’t know what an iso file is or how to create a CD with one, no sweat. Just visit the Ubuntu home page, download the iso and read up on the well-written tutorial available there.)

A Wubi installation from CD in Windows is just like installing any Windows app you’ve ever installed, only a bit slicker than some. *heh* On a Toshiba Satellite WinXP system, the hard part was putting the CD in the drive. *yawn* Slipped it in during a commercial break (was watching one of my Wonder Woman’s fav shows with her) and autostart brought up the Wubi installer. Told it what user name and password I wanted and let it trundle along. Next commercial break, looked over at the notebook and it was asking for a reboot. Let it. It did its thing and before next commercial break it was rebooting and giving me a choice of booting Windows XP or Ubuntu, using the Windows XP boot manager.

Slick.

Found the Intel wireless card, started surfing with Firefox. Nothing to it.

The next Wubi install wasn’t so easy. *sigh* A seven-year-old HP (running Win2K) that’s seen better days. The installation kept failing when the CD drive bailed rerpeatedly. Sure, I could have simply plopped another optical drive in, but… Wubi doesn’t really need a CD to install Ubuntu. I could have simply copied the wubi.exe file off the CD and then invoked it without the CD in the drive, but instead, I downloaded a fresh copy from wubi-installer.org and–with no CD i the drive–invoked Wubi and told it what username/password combo I wanted. It promptly downloaded the installation files for Ubuntu and trubdled along downloading and installing them without further interaction from me.

Really slick.

There’s supposed to be a performance hit because of using the Windows file system in installing Ubuntu, but frankly, on this old 1.3 Ghz computer with only 384MB of RAM, I don’t notice one at all. In fact, it’s markedly faster than the Windows install on the same computer!

All my Windows partitions (four of them) on this computer are mountable and read/writeable with Ubuntu installed this way (can access them if it’s installed the regular way, too, just not as easily, at least for folks who don’t like to play techie).

Of course I immediately downloaded and installed the Opera Browser (I’m using the 9.50 Beta2 version).

Open Office is installed by default, so all my Open Office files on this (and networked comps) are read/writeable.A couple of specialty apps still to download (e.g., Audacity, which is available crossplatform), but that’ll be a snap. Then I need to install Thunderbird and import my email from a T-Bird store on another computer. I’ll also have to install Wine later, so I can try getting a couple of “indispensable” Windows apps running in Ubuntu, but apart from a few little things, I think this computer’s just found its new OS.

And yes, I think I’ll be using this comp for a while, now.

I want to try Fluxbubtu on an even older, Pentium III 500Mhz computer… as soon as I can find a spare low-capacity (30 GB or less) hard drive to slap in the thing. If I can breathe some life into that old guy with a super lean OS, I think that’d be fun.

My takeaway on this iteration of Ubuntu?

For average users who just need to cruise the web, do email, some photos, music, office app-ing, etc. and who aren’t already locked into some proprietary crap from Windows or Apple (iPod, anyone? *yech*), an older box with Ubuntu installed with the default apps will just about cover their needs. And if they need more or different software, the Synaptic installer is easy-peasy to use to download and install tons of FREE software.

And where a given app isn’t in the Ubuntu repositories, like the Opera 9.50 Beta2 I downloaded and installed first thing, well, that’s as easy as it get’s too. Downloaded it and double-clicked on the file. Ubuntu invoked the proper installer and away I went.

Yep. Ubuntu 8.04 is much, much more “Aunt Tilly” ready than… Vista.

(N.B.–although Ubuntu 8.04 doesn’t come with a “firewall” enabled out of the box, it’s still a little more than moderately secure (iptables built into the kernel), as I sit here behind a hardware firewall. In fact, hitting the Shields Up! page at grc.com yields results showing the first 1056 TCP ports on this lil ole box are “stealthed”–as far as the Shields Up! utility is concerned, at least. I guess I’ll get around to an anti-virus scanner one of these days, too.)

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UPDATE: I’ve been meaning to get around to making virtualization work, but just hadn’t done it. VMWare is touted as being the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the Linux boxes I tried installing it on all seemed to say, “Nuh-uh, no way,” in several different and intransigent ways (yeh, yeh: probably Olde Pharte Errore). *heh* So, on this old box, with meager computing and memory resources, I thought, “Surely no way,” and… I was right. But. Sun Microsystems’ Virtualbox was happy to install on Hardy Heron… and Virtualbox had no real problem installing… Windows 98 (needed for ONE music transcription program). Tomorrow, I’ll crank out the CD for the transcription software and see how it likes running in a Win98 virtual machine running under Ubuntu 8.04.

Down the line (Real Soon Now) will be a new comp with 3Gig or more memory and a honking big hard drive that I can use to test out a Linux install (yeh, probably Ubuntu, and probably 64-bit) with Virtualbox and WinXP, Win2K and maybe more (PCBSD, anyone? :-)). Heck, I may consolodate all my $$ licensed OSes in one machine and convert the rest to various Linux distros and/or PCBSD–a really, really nice OS/GUI. Hmmm, how about Puppy Linux on an 8GB (or larger) flashdrive and NO hard drive? Would need a relatively recent computer for that to work well, but that wouldn’t be all that hard to do.

Interesting times.

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Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Right Truth, Kodera’s Korner, , Leaning Straight Up, Cao’s Blog, Democrat=Socialist, Conservative Cat, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, Woman Honor Thyself, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, The Pink Flamingo, CORSARI D’ITALIA, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.