Ubuntu – Here I come

My previous experiences with non- big sister operating systems are limited to OS/2 Warp and Suse Linux. The first was my primary OS for many months (in the times of Windows 3.1, as it did everything… better). Life with Suse on the other hand, ah! that was something of an experience. And not a happy one, either. Very short, though. Fortunately.

Installation (with the help of something I recall being called “Yast”, which always made me think of yeast. Not pleasant) was not nearly as straightforward as they claimed. And when the assistant told me that it was done doing its job and I found myself sitting in front of a black screen with a blinking cursor (despite having chosen to install something called a KDE), I called it a day. Suse was unceremoniously fdisked and big sister’s win95 went back onto my screaming 10k rpm scsi hard disks.

Since then, I haven’t touched anything calling itself an OS if it wasn’t designed in Redmond, WA. When Ubuntu came along, I downloaded it and started it up, once, just to see. I thought it was rather pretty, but I was a bit underwhelmed, so I didn’t install and then forgot about it again. When I got my laptop (HP Pavillion dv3550ez) it came equipped with Vista. Now, I’d heard all the bad things that are being said about that OS, and I suppose they’re true. How’s this for an example: a newly booted Vista is idling (1.5 minutes pure boot time, then all the services and agents and applications initialising for another 3 minutes) with 0.9GB memory occupied. Doesn’t look like optimised use of resources to me. In and of itself, this is not a tragedy, but it does rather seem like a waste.

That’s when I remembered Ubuntu and I decided to give it another go. The download was easy and fast. Deciding on a setup option was not quite as simple a task. Sometimes, having too many choices isn’t the best of things (options always come with both a value and a cost, the cost often gets ignored). Should I

• Remove Vista and completely remplace it with Ubuntu (not a wise choice with no experience in using the thing, IMO)
• Set up Ubuntu as a Windows Application (this, I think, is quite ingenious, as it even allows you to use Windows’ “Remove software” feature to get rid of Ubuntu in case you don’t like it. However, since it will then be using the same file system, it claims to suffer from small performance hits)
• Or set Ubuntu up on its own partitions, with a dual boot option to be able to choose between Vista and Ubuntu on startup?

I went with the third option, as it just seemed the right thing to do. I mean, if you’re going to do something, might as well do it right. Right?
The installation assistant is very straightforward and, well…. assists you. Not many choices (language, location,keyboard layout, user, password), then the question of where to install (remove previous operating system, or dual boot setup, answered by choosing option #2), from there on it’s all automatic. Very pain free, and the whole operation takes no more than 15 minutes.
The moment of truth: does my “precious” Vista still boot? Answer is yes (it does do a checkdisk and it finds new disks on startup, but everything else is as normal). Then: does Ubuntu boot? Again the answer is yes. Yay! It actually looks even prettier than what I remembered, it boots up really fast, and the things I need function (ie. screen, internal mouse, WLAN, USB ports). The moment I connect to the WLAN, Ubutu tells me there are updates available (approx 350MB worth) and I think “Cool, this is well organised, let’s update!” That’s where reality hits: not enough disk space. Argh!

The whole experience is quite fascinating. I find it amazing how we (I, at least) get used to things working in a certain way. It took me a while to get used to the “Start button” not being on the bottom left, but the TOP left of my screen. But then I quickly found Firefox (again thinking “Cool! Everything I might need is already here, including Open Office. Double cool!”). The logical thing to do is -obviously- search the web for help freeing up disk space. Alas! Firefox can’t start up because: you guessed it: Not enough disk space!

To cut a rather long story short: after a week of trying to figure things out, I reinstalled Ubuntu, this time choosing to set up the partitions manually. I seem to have gotten it more or less right (although the 4GB of swap are never used, and /home appears to be slightly oversized with 9GB (only 300MB are used))

My Ubuntu is now working just fine. And I can’t stop being amazed at how much faster and resource friendly it is (it is booted and ready to use in under 1 minute, and with Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office Writer running I still only have 600MB of memory used. And the best part is that (almost) everything works. Even the Swisscom Mobile Unlimited modem, the one thing I fully expected NOT to function correctly. I plugged it in on a whim and it simply worked! It is a lot faster to connect than it ever was under windows with the unlimited data manager.

The ONLY thing that does not work is sound. But I’m confident that I’ll soon find a solution to that as well.

To sum it up: I am impressed! Very, very impressed! I hardly ever boot up Vista any more (for iTunes, Half Life 2 and Oblivion) and I feel very silly for not having tried out Ubuntu before now. Very, very silly indeed.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Doing the geek thing with Linux (doctorrw.blogspot.com)
• PC makers mum about Chrome OS (news.cnet.com)
• Google’s Chrome OS vs. Ubuntu (UNR) vs. Window 7 (ibeentoubuntu.com)