Catshanghai

My 18 month year old Dell desktop recently threw a curveball at me when the hard drive failed. Luckily, I backed up all my important data on to DVDs so I didn’t lose anything when another portable drive failed to mount properly.

A new hard drive with no data was a blank canvas for me to become a fully fledged Linux user. I have dabbled with live CDs before, but I had trouble creating a non ntfs partition on which to install it. Still, I was impressed that the Linux Gnome interface and operating system had come a long way since I tried out Red Hat a few years ago. This time around, the drivers of the live CD recognised all my hardware and I had no trouble getting on to the Internet. It felt and behaved a lot like Windows and there were many reasons for me to migrate once I had time to play with it over the holidays.

I am going to carry on being a Windows user, but I want to learn how to use Linux. I know it is a robust operating system that is open to endless customisation. It is an open source GPL project meaning the code is available for anyone to tinker with endlessly. I have heard stories about Linux computers never crashing and working really well with older hardware. It is also a safer operating system for Internet use. Unlike Windows, Linux does not automatically confer admin rights to every user so a nasty virus or rootkit can not get into the kernel and compromise your system. There seems to be a Linux open source alternative for just about every piece of software you could imagine and the best thing is that nearly all of it is free.

Ubuntu is Mark Shuttleworth’s charitable project to make software and computer based learning resources available to school children throughout Africa and the developing world. Therefore, he has created a distribution of Debian Linux that is very easy to install. It is free to download and the foundation will even mail you a free installation CD. It took me ages to download the iso file, because I tried to do this two days after the Taiwanese earthquake. It is relatively straightforward to burn an installation CD from a Windows machine, but you need to have some technical experience for it to work. I can not imagine my technophobic mother burning an Ubuntu disk.

Installation was fine. I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake, which entitles me to free support. There is also 6.10 Ubuntu Edgy, but I have not tried this alternative. I had fun testing all the new software, but it took me a little while to figure out how I could download additional programs such as codecs to playback mainstream music and video formats, a flash player and support for my Ipod. Software can not be downloaded and installed from any source. The admin user has to give authorisation to add a software repository that you can download and install from. It is a bit like a licensed software supplier to prevent security problems or software conflicts. Ubuntu offers support to official repositories, but not to software downloaded from the wider universe and multiverse of Linux developers. Sorry! Ubuntu invented these names, not me.

I spend 75 percent of my Ubuntu time using the Firefox browser to research, blog and communicate. I use gtkpod to add music and videos to my ipod, although it corrupted my Itunes database and the reinstall has broken the DRM for my purchased downloads. I have installed Skype, but the Internet is too slow to make calls at the moment. I use Ipodder to download netcasts and Audacity to edit audio. I have had a look at the Kino video editor, Istanbul screencast maker, RipperX for extracting music from CDs and VLC for media playback. It offers about 95 percent of what I want from a personal computer.

At some stage, I will buy a Macbook to be able to run Windows and OSX on the same machine, but this middle aged desktop is very happy to run Ubuntu for the forseeable future.