Sometimes, no matter how many times you tell yourself not to, you still sneak a peak at that Maserati, or the Lamborghini Diablo or the Morgan that is parked at the side of the road, for a fleeting moment you look, smile and imagine yourself driving one of those if only….and then you turn back to your slightly flaky, well known 55 plate middle of the road car and carry on as you were.

That’s what it is like being a Windows user catching a glimpse of someone’s sexy Linux desktop – you yearn for the financial and intellectual freedom of Linux, but there is always the “technical” bit holding you back, like a lack of £200k for that car, your lack of knowledge of the arcane switches on dusty commands, your need for things to “just work” and crucially, a desire to not end up knee deep in cd’s and books on the intricacies C programming for Linux that hold you back.

Not any more!!!

The answer to your problems might be blowing in the Ubuntu wind…in the shape of the most excellent Karmic Koala released in October 2009.

I write this blog post on my Dell Inspiron 1501 running Ubuntu 9.1, yes Ubuntu and you know what, it’s been like this for around 2 weeks now and I have yet to find something I cannot do with it yet. This laptop was laboring under the heavy weight of Windows Vista Home Basic with all the effects turned off and it STILL ran like a dog. Now, on Ubuntu with sexy effects in full force it is still fast and suhweeeet.

Let me avail you of my story..but first a disclaimer – I am an IT Consultant and Intranet developer by trade, but NOT a hardware or kernel/Linux hacker and have ZERO desire to spend time configuring something to work – in short I am your average impatient Windows user.

I figured I would try Ubuntu again just to see if my WiFi would work – yes wifi was the only thing that was holding me back. So I downloaded the iso, whacked in on cd, slipped it in my dvd rom and rebooted the laptop.

The Live CD (the version that runs from the cd and memory and does not do anything to your laptop) worked first time – it told me what I needed to do to get the wifi working (enable some drivers – even that was easy!!!) and PRESTO!!! wifi working, and I was striding the Internet atop my Ubuntu laptop – amazing!!!

So I figured well, what the heck, I’ll install it. During the PAINLESS install routine I partition the drive so I get to keep windows in case I need to use my T-Mobile internet dongle and reboot.

But wait, I boot up and….arrrgggghhh! No wifi…for some reason the install did not make the wifi activation as easy as it was but, seriously with 2-3 clicks I was up and running again!

OK so I thought about what I would want to do on this laptop and had a delve around the Ubuntu Software Centre (USC) and found some tools that I thought would do the job which I installed with a simple click of the mouse and….gasp….NO REBOOTING!

• Blogilo (Blogging client)
• OpenOffice (D’uh!)
• Tweetdeck (Twitter and Facebook app)
• Xiphos (Bible study)
• gPodder (Podcasting)
• Empathy (IM)

I also installed the following additional software from the vendor sites:

• XMind (Mind mapping uber software – open source and fantastic!!!)
• DropBox (File sharing/remote storage – free 2Gb storage)

Then I figured I might like to listen to some live music so, off I toddled to the Spotify website but PANTS! No Linux version. Hmmm, maybe Wine would work – no problem USC to the rescue, now would this work?

I had my doubts to be honest, I figured I would still have to compile something, do SOMETHING at the command line…..but no…Wine installed with no problems, then I installed Spotify with simply a click and by jingo it worked….I mean LOOK!!!

Spotify on Ubuntu under Wine

OK, so how about something even more demonic…..Internet Explorer (strictly for development testing of course). I found IEs4Linux and after some downloading, a little bit of simple cut and paste command line stuff…..it worked!!!!

Internet Exploder on Ubuntu

So, I have 2 out of my 3 machines now running Ubuntu – this laptop and my server. next stop (Once I have figured out how to import a .pst file into Thunderbird) is my desktop – give that the Ubuntu treatment and it should fly…

I think it is probably wrong that having a great operating system working on your laptop with no problems should illicit such a warm and fuzzy feeling inside but hey, I am gonna hang with that feeling….now, where did I put my LifeCam….I feel brave enough for a command line challenge…

Kudos to the Ubuntu team – great product, great effort, great job!

Tags: Blogilo, Dropbox, Empanthy, gPodder, IEs4Linux, Install, OpenOffice, Replace, Spotify, Tweetdeck, Ubuntu, Windows, WIne, xiphos, xmind

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Debate, Education, Freedom, Geek, General, Linux, Misc, News, Personal, Random Thoughts, Revolution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.