http://www.ryanblock.com/2006/07/bits-and-pieces-from-the-past-month/ Editor and technology critic in the midst of founding a new content startup. Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:42:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7-RC1-10026 hourly 1 http://www.ryanblock.com/2006/07/bits-and-pieces-from-the-past-month/comment-page-1/#comment-820 Marc Perton » Blog Archive » Speaking of penguins… Fri, 11 Aug 2006 02:19:21 +0000 http://www.ryanblock.com/archive/2006/07/bits-and-pieces-from-the-past-month/#comment-820 [...] While Ryan may have boldly switched over to the Jobs OS, I’ve recently gone the other way. No, I haven’t abandoned OSX or XP; I’ve got boxes running both (or rather, I’ve got boxes running each; no dual-OS Intel box for me — yet). But when the hard drive on my venerable HP Omnibook 510 notebook gave up the ghost recently, I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on a replacement drive, instead of XP (and instead of buying another laptop; I got this one on eBay for about $150 a couple of years ago, and it’s served me well). I had practical reasons for doing so — one of the main ones being that the five-year-old laptop was pretty sluggish under XP (despite the fact that it came with XP Pro preinstalled, with just a 1.13 GHz processor and 640 MB RAM, it was starting to show its age). That, and I didn’t have any install or recovery discs, and I wasn’t willing to deal with jumping through the many hoops required to get replacements from HP. So, Linux it would be. Installing went relatively smoothly — though relatively is, er, a relative term. Since I don’t have a CD-ROM for the 510, I decided the easiest thing would be to install directly to the hard drive by hooking it up to a desktop with one of those newfangled IDE-to-USB cables. I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu, burned it to a CD, and rebooted my desktop. After the obligatory BIOS tweak, the PC booted from the Ubuntu CD, and I ran the installer. About a half hour later, I had a working Ubuntu drive, which I slotted into my laptop. And here’s where the relative part comes in: Though Ubuntu has a well-deserved reputation for being easy to install and use, that rep is based largely on the assumption that you’re going to install it directly to a computer from a CD, not to a drive that you’ll then be installing in a different computer. Bottom line: I ended up having to edit the GRUB menu to recognize the new drive as hda1, since the installer had automatically set it up as sda1. Hardly major, but I was glad I knew how to do it. So, now I’m a happy Ubuntu user. And I really am happy. Last time I tried using a desktop version of Linux was about six years ago, and I found it to be more trouble than it was worth (I was using Caldera OpenLinux, from the company now known as SCO Group — and also known for suing Linux distributors for allegedly violating its patents). Ubuntu is a completely different beast, with a ton of preinstalled software, including Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the usual suite of Gnome apps. The few Microsoft apps I need for work (Outlook, Project) all function reasonably under Wine. And the software has recognized just about every peripheral I’ve thrown at it, from USB pen drives to a PCMCIA WiFi card. If this is the future of desktop Linux, Microsoft - and Apple — had better watch out. [...] [...] While Ryan may have boldly switched over to the Jobs OS, I’ve recently gone the other way. No, I haven’t abandoned OSX or XP; I’ve got boxes running both (or rather, I’ve got boxes running each; no dual-OS Intel box for me — yet). But when the hard drive on my venerable HP Omnibook 510 notebook gave up the ghost recently, I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on a replacement drive, instead of XP (and instead of buying another laptop; I got this one on eBay for about $150 a couple of years ago, and it’s served me well). I had practical reasons for doing so — one of the main ones being that the five-year-old laptop was pretty sluggish under XP (despite the fact that it came with XP Pro preinstalled, with just a 1.13 GHz processor and 640 MB RAM, it was starting to show its age). That, and I didn’t have any install or recovery discs, and I wasn’t willing to deal with jumping through the many hoops required to get replacements from HP. So, Linux it would be. Installing went relatively smoothly — though relatively is, er, a relative term. Since I don’t have a CD-ROM for the 510, I decided the easiest thing would be to install directly to the hard drive by hooking it up to a desktop with one of those newfangled IDE-to-USB cables. I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu, burned it to a CD, and rebooted my desktop. After the obligatory BIOS tweak, the PC booted from the Ubuntu CD, and I ran the installer. About a half hour later, I had a working Ubuntu drive, which I slotted into my laptop. And here’s where the relative part comes in: Though Ubuntu has a well-deserved reputation for being easy to install and use, that rep is based largely on the assumption that you’re going to install it directly to a computer from a CD, not to a drive that you’ll then be installing in a different computer. Bottom line: I ended up having to edit the GRUB menu to recognize the new drive as hda1, since the installer had automatically set it up as sda1. Hardly major, but I was glad I knew how to do it. So, now I’m a happy Ubuntu user. And I really am happy. Last time I tried using a desktop version of Linux was about six years ago, and I found it to be more trouble than it was worth (I was using Caldera OpenLinux, from the company now known as SCO Group — and also known for suing Linux distributors for allegedly violating its patents). Ubuntu is a completely different beast, with a ton of preinstalled software, including Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the usual suite of Gnome apps. The few Microsoft apps I need for work (Outlook, Project) all function reasonably under Wine. And the software has recognized just about every peripheral I’ve thrown at it, from USB pen drives to a PCMCIA WiFi card. If this is the future of desktop Linux, Microsoft - and Apple — had better watch out. [...]

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