Jon Upchurch

I think I’m in love… /swoon

My new laptop just arrived today.  It’s nothing special in the hardware department -
Pentium Core 2 Duo 2Ghz
2Gb – 800Mhz RAM
150Gb 5400 RPM HDD
15″ display running at 1080i

In the past I didn’t like Ubuntu, but what I’ve come to discover is that it’s REALLY matured as an OS. It’s definitely not yet a system that can be setup, run, and maintained by less than a technician, but for day-to-day usage anyone could use one.

Afraid of what owuld happen if I messed anything up, I immediately made use of the life-preserver on the desktop – the Dell system restore dik creator. I was already beginning to be impressed at how usable this was to someone with Linux experience but who wasn’t a Linux expert. It both burned a DVD without incident and then created a restore save on my USB Drive with no problems.

So far it was winning points. It only gets better as it goes forward. I started getting the desktop environment exactly how I wanted it, and that was very easy and HIGHLY configurable. Granted, that’s the Gnome environment, not Ubuntu, but even so. What really impressed me was the package manager by Synaptek. [sp?] Adding and removing program components, usually a nightmare on Linux, was very easy, and getting updates, even from 9.02 to 9.04, was as easy as clicking a button! Then, I needed to install the Java/J2SE-JDK, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, and Netbeans. It was for all intentes and purposes just as easy as doing it on Windows!

So despite the fact that of my computers, this machine is the least powerful, it’s fast becoming my favorite workstation! I’m VERY impressed, and looking forward to trying some things I’d never managed with Linux before.