I’ve been interested in Linux ever since I heard about some red hat my friend had set up. He never showed it to me directly, but he gave me the CD’s for it. It wouldn’t even boot on an old computer I had, so I quickly dismissed it.
After getting into digg and slashdot and others like that I heard a lot of buzz centered around ubuntu, but I never pursued it. It wasn’t until a writer whose blog I follow made his own “switch” to linux. And it inspired me to do so as well. That, coupled with a new release of the software had me sold. I realize Ubuntu isn’t exactly the get on your knees and get dirty distro, but it’s a start.
So I downloaded the .iso, burned it to a CD. I then realized how confusing partitions are… It took a lot of research to figure out exactly what type of partitions I needed, because the Gnome partition utility wouldn’t do what I wanted to. It probably would have, but I was just too frustrated.
I set up my partitions correctly, and then I’m set! My wireless card wasn’t natively supported, and the only solution was Linuxant’s driverloader, with a $19.95 liscense. I used the free trial for a week, then came across a wireless card someone else was throwing out, which was a godsend. It worked flawlessly with ubuntu’s open source drivers. The only propietary drivers i’m using is for my ATI. But that’s another post on it’s own.
I’ve been using it for about a month now, and I’ll provide overall opinions on it later, but I’m pretty sure that the switch is there to stay. I kinda messed up my windows XP installation, so I have no choice! I’m not worrying, there are alternatives to anything I could want to do. I’m probably even utilizing my computer more with Ubuntu than I ever have with windows!
