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After nine hours of downloading from the mirror at OSU, my connection was lost.\u00a0 I tried one of the torrents just to compare the download time.<\/p>\nAfter nine hours of downloading from the mirror at OSU, my connection was lost.\u00a0 I tried one of the torrents just to compare the download time.<\/p>\n
Twenty minutes later, I had the ISO on my hard drive.\u00a0 What a great way to distribute software.<\/p>\n
I didn’t get to install the software until this morning.\u00a0 The install is very simple.\u00a0 I have a Dell laptop (Latitude D800) that I use as a sandbox machine.\u00a0 It had XP on it when I started the Ubuntu install.\u00a0 I told the Linux OS to use the whole hard drive and replace anything on the drive.\u00a0 It got to 15% and stalled.\u00a0 It couldn’t kill off the existing OS.\u00a0 That’s no big deal.\u00a0 I pulled out the Death and Destruction Disk (DDD).\u00a0 Years ago I needed a way to format a disk in a minute or two without answering any questions.\u00a0 I went through all the steps of manually formatting a disk.\u00a0 Once it was blank, I made a Ghost image.\u00a0 The image fits on a floppy with the Ghost software.\u00a0 It takes 90 seconds to erase any hard drive and leave it boot-able to only DOS.<\/p>\n
After I blanked the hard drive, Ubuntu had no problem doing the full install.\u00a0 All my hardware was auto-detected and the login screen came right up.\u00a0 On the first boot, I was told that a non-supported driver was available for my NVidia video card.\u00a0 The splash screen said I could only do 3D graphics if I installed this driver.\u00a0 So I installed it.<\/p>\n
I had to reboot to\u00a0enable it.<\/p>\n
That was the end of that.\u00a0 My graphics were completely hosed.\u00a0 I could see half the screen and everything flickered.\u00a0 There were no icons, just a solid orange rectangle.\u00a0 I rebooted and did a safe-mode “get me back to what was working” thing.\u00a0 Without too much pain, I got everything running again.<\/p>\n
I am not impressed by this interface.\u00a0 All the text looks rough.\u00a0 I don’t know if there is an anti-aliasing setting that I am missing, but things look long in the tooth here.\u00a0 If I have to look at this all day, it needs to be cleaner.<\/p>\n
When I connected to my music server, it wouldn’t play an MP3 without an encoder download.\u00a0 This is easy?\u00a0 It won’t play a standard non-DRMed MP3 out of the box?<\/p>\n
Here is the deal breaker.\u00a0 I connected my Dell monitor.\u00a0 It’s a standard 1024×768 flat panel.\u00a0 I couldn’t get it to work at all.\u00a0 I fiddled with it for an hour.\u00a0 It’s basically a solid color matching the laptop background, but random ANSI characters flicker all around the screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n
My laptop has to connect to an external display (monitor or projector).\u00a0 Without that, I can’t do my job.<\/p>\n
I let the kids play around with it the rest of the day.\u00a0 They had no problem browsing the Internet and doing IM.\u00a0 I suppose if I wanted to setup a lap in a school for just that, this OS would be fine.\u00a0 The mere fact that\u00a0most of the kids are not going to know how to install software will keep them from do too much to the machines.<\/p>\n
Let me repeat yesterday’s question.\u00a0 What does this OS do that my current OS doesn’t?\u00a0 Nothing.\u00a0 There is no incentive to switch.\u00a0 In fact, a switch would involve a lot of pain that I don’t have right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After nine hours of downloading from the mirror at OSU, my connection was lost.\u00a0 I tried one of the torrents just to compare the download time. Twenty minutes later, I had the ISO on my hard drive.\u00a0 What a great … Continue reading