Today I downloaded the Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) and installed it on a vanilla Celeron 2.4ghz, 1gb RAM box that I had around.
It took me about 60 minutes to download the full *.iso and about 4 minutes to burn it to a ROM. After that, I used the ROM to boot into the system and Ubuntu booted from the ROM on bootstrap seamlessly.
I was worried at first because it took a long time to load from the ROM but it eventually came up to the desktop. From the desktop was a command to install to the local hard disk.
It was all GUI and brainless. Following the wizard, I re-partitioned the drive (standard IDE master, 80gb, with a slave at 4gb), wiping Windows 2003 Server off of it – ironic – and watched as Ubuntu did the rest. It was a clean navigation and write experience – faster than Windows – and it asked for a restart.
After restart, it went cleanly into the UI. Again brainless, and a great looking desktop. Here’s a shot.
Then I started to poke around. It took me a while to try to find some drivers for my wireless NIC but even then I couldn’t get the driver settings working correctly. So I moved the box physically aside my switch and restarted. DHCP did the trick, the box immediately coming up and allowing me to browse. Plus, OpenOffice was already installed with the image. I was on the net, able to access all of my online services and with a full productivity suite in less than 30 minutes with Ubuntu.
Then, I thought I’d get tricky. I configured remote access on the Ubuntu box and downloaded RealVNC for my Windows Vista station. Snap – I was remoting to Ubuntu from Vista within 5 minutes; and Ubuntu has a native RDC terminal server client which would have allowed me to control my Vista station, if I desired.
So, staging the box for remote access was pretty brainless – I wanted to see what would happen if I requested Ubuntu to update itself from the ‘Net.
Again, easy as cake. I didn’t have to know any terminal command or anything – the darn thing downloaded and extracted its own updates. The whole install took me under an hour and all I had to do was point and click.
So that was fun. So I have my own Ubuntu box now and I’m playing with the possibilities. It actually turned out easier of an install for me than Vista, which – again – is fairly ironic. Next up: downloading and installing Ubuntu server.
R
Leave a Comment
|
Rick G says:
Commented posted on: May 6, 2007
Cool! I too have played with the desktop version of Ubuntu. I could only spend a day or two with it while in between classes – which brings me to my question…Have you had the opportunity to use a Linux system running something like OpenOffice to submit APA formatted docs to an online University? I’ve wanted to try, but do not want to jeapordize the grading structure due to an improperly formatted import from my Linux OS based file to the instructor’s undeniably assimilated Windows based file…:) And then of course, there’s the Itunes issue with the Ipods on Linux…