Posted 01/07/2008 at 06:19:52pm

I recently had a computer in my office fail. While it was undergoing repair, my partner demanded a computer to use while his was out. I found an old Gateway (PIII 450 mHz) loaded with Win98. However, when I fired up this old warrior, the hard drive did not join the party. Uh-oh. I pulled an extra hard drive from another unused computer (guess what MY closet looks like) and put it in the Gateway. That left me short just one little thing- an operating system. Considered buying a version of Windows for just long enough to laugh out loud at the cost. Then I thought about the articles I had read about Linux. Hmmmmmm. I did some research and ended up on the Ubuntu site. After downloading the most recent LTS version, I burned it to a CD. Then I was introduced to the ISO concept (after the CD wouldn't load no matter what I did). OK, more reading, download and install ISO recorder and burn ISO on CD. Set computer to boot from CD (yes, I almost missed that). Insert disk and close CD............. It LOADED! After about 20 minutes of quite verbose and sometimes hilarious comments about failures during the loading process (none of which stopped the process, by the way), I was deposited at a quite reasonable screen. Everthing worked, albeit a bit slowly- this was running off the Live CD. I played with the computer for a couple of hours to make sure it worked. It did, except I could never get a Microsoft USB wireless G adapter to work (an apparently quite common problem). Open Office did exactly what it was supposed to do. Excellent. Turn everything off, and take the computer to the office. At the office. Power up and everything still works great (notice that I still haven't stopped running the Live CD). I notice, at that point, the install option. Hadn't I just done that? Apparently not. Chose the option, and off we went. Once installed, the computer was MUCH faster. Indeed almost as fast as some much more up-to-date machines in my office. Then the fun started. I plugged in the Ethernet cable for the office LAN. I waited for some screen to pop-up and tell me I was connected. Well, it didn't, and by the way I wasn't. More reading (get used to this) and configuring. This was really not that hard, and if I had ever done anything with networks before it would have taken about ten minutes instead of one and one half hours. Did it ultimately work? It absolutely did! Did I learn a whole hell of a lot about my office network? I sure did :). Overall impressions of the experience: I liked Ubuntu. It was easy. My partner, a noted Windowsphile, just started using the machine and didn't complain. There were two issues I couldn't beat- I could never get the two printers to do anything more than basic functionality. The printers did excellent work from Open Office Text and spreadsheet. They would, however, never print pictures very well at all.

Posted 01/07/2008 at 06:16:33pm

I recently had a computer in my office fail. While it was undergoing repair, my partner demanded a computer to use while his was out. I found an old Gateway (PIII 450 mHz) loaded with Win98. However, when I fired up this old warrior, the hard drive did not join the party. Uh-oh. I pulled an extra hard drive from another unused computer (guess what MY closet looks like) and put it in the Gateway. That left me short just one little thing- an operating system. Considered buying a version of Windows for just long enough to laugh out loud at the cost. Then I thought about the articles I had read about Linux. Hmmmmmm. I did some research and ended up on the Ubuntu site. After downloading the most recent LTS version, I burned it to a CD. Then I was introduced to the ISO concept (after the CD wouldn't load no matter what I did). OK, more reading, download and install ISO recorder and burn ISO on CD. Set computer to boot from CD (yes, I almost missed that). Insert disk and close CD............. It LOADED! After about 20 minutes of quite verbose and sometimes hilarious comments about failures during the loading process (none of which stopped the process, by the way), I was deposited at a quite reasonable screen. Everthing worked, albeit a bit slowly- this was running off the Live CD. I played with the computer for a couple of hours to make sure it worked. It did, except I could never get a Microsoft USB wireless G adapter to work (an apparently quite common problem). Open Office did exactly what it was supposed to do. Excellent. Turn everything off, and take the computer to the office. At the office. Power up and everything still works great (notice that I still haven't stopped running the Live CD). I notice, at that point, the install option. Hadn't I just done that? Apparently not. Chose the option, and off we went. Once installed, the computer was MUCH faster. Indeed almost as fast as some much more up-to-date machines in my office. Then the fun started. I plugged in the Ethernet cable for the office LAN. I waited for some screen to pop-up and tell me I was connected. Well, it didn't, and by the way I wasn't. More reading (get used to this) and configuring. This was really not that hard, and if I had ever done anything with networks before it would have taken about ten minutes instead of one and one half hours. Did it ultimately work? It absolutely did! Did I learn a whole hell of a lot about my office network? I sure did :). Overall impressions of the experience: I liked Ubuntu. It was easy. My partner, a noted Windowsphile, just started using the machine and didn't complain. There were two issues I couldn't beat- I could never get the two printers to do anything more than basic functionality. The printers did excellent work from Open Office Text and spreadsheet. They would, however, never print pictures very well at all.