Keys Corner

Amazon recommended Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks to me a couple of weeks ago. And, having read various positive reviews about Ubuntu, I decided to get it.

Up until now, my experiments with Linux have been of limited success and use – at irregular intervals I’ve loaded the latest and greatest Suse Linux version onto our “cellar-PC” (its only reason for existence is as an emergency PC, in case if we ever have an application that will only run under a real windows installation – the rest of the PCs in our household are various Apple Macs), but despite trying two or three different WLAN cards in the PC, I’ve never succeeded in getting the WLAN configured and hooked up to the Internet. These days a PC without Internet access is a rather expensive door-stop.

I have been pleasantly surprised. I booted the PC using the “Edgy Eft” version DVD that C’t distributed a couple of weeks ago, and was amazed that even running directly from the DVD, Ubuntu found my WLAN card, configured it, and was able access the Internet! I immediately decided to overwrite the Suse 10.1 installation I already had on the PC with Ubuntu. There were no problems at all, and I’ve even installed the Skype RPM for Mandriva 10.1 and higher, which involved first installing Alien to convert it from an RPM package to a DEB package before Skype could be installed – again no problems, it just worked. That’s something I’m used to on our Apple Macs, but not in Windows or Linux. I am someone who knows almost nothing about Linux, so a “just works” behavior is exactly what I need.

If you want to try Linux, let me recommend the book I mentioned above and the Ubuntu version of Linux – I don’t think you can go wrong.

(Posted directly from Ubuntu, of course!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 18:12:52 and is filed under Computing, Family / This Site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.