Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I’m trying Ubuntu Linux on an old compaq laptop I have (and brought with me to California.) It’s an old Compaq Armada (m300) that I bought used last year, and weighs about 2 pounds without the accessory bay. It was pretty cheap when I bought it, but it must have cost a fortune when it was new. I’ve installed regular Debian on it, plus a couple of versions of Fedora.

I’ve been hearing all sorts of good things about Ubuntu, and I figured it was time to try it out. Here’s my basic experience and review of it.

The most recent version of Ubuntu is 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). You can get it from their download page. They have regular ISOs, bittorrent files, and jigdo files. They’ve got some good mirrors, because the regular ISO download isn’t too slow.

I am intimately familiar with Debian, and Debian installs, but I’m going to write this as if I wasn’t - I think that would make it the most useful.

The first part of the install process (basic configuration, partitioning and base system install)  is very straightforward - there were few choices to make, the hardware was detected flawlessly, and the install went easily. I kinda went away after the first reboot, and was greeted with the login screen when I came back. No intervention was necessary. Easier install than Windows, I think.

A few things were a bit odd - for example there wasn’t a request for a root password - the default root password seems to be the same as the password for the single user account that was set up during install.

Gnome is the default desktop, and the only one installed by default - I’m a KDE fan. I switched my desktop environment in a way that I’m familiar with (install the kde packages, then change the default desktop manager in /etc/X11.)  Kubuntu, which is the sub-project to bring KDE to Ubuntu, seems really nice - and if I’d read the Kubuntu page first, I would have had an easier time switching to KDE.

The basic add/remove applications interface is nice, and the advanced panel has everything. The configuration editor is not really intuitive, but for those who don’t like the command line, it’s an improvement over basic CLI configuration.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu so far - the ease of install and configuration, matched with Debian’s ease of software update, etc. We’ll see how it works when I try to set up development environments (both Postgres/Perl and Ruby for Ruby on Rails) but I can’t imagine, given the Debian base, that I’ll run into trouble.