Cus Productions

I decided to forgo the obligatory Windows install disk for my new laptop and stick Ubuntu on it, much like my last one.

Thought I'd give a quick rundown about my experience.

First off – completely blat the entire drive. Always good to start
from a clean slate. My laptop comes with a 'boot-to-dvd' facility which
allows you to run dvds without booting into a full operating system.
This was installed next from the CD that Toshiba thoughtfully provided.
This takes up a partition of about 250Mb. Hardly a loss on an 80 Gig
system. Made happy mental note that this facility is powered by Linux

Next came the tricky part. Put the Ubuntu CD in and boot from it. Took all the defaults and in the time it took to watch an episode of Holby City I had a fully working machine.

Configuration of the wireless network was achieved through a GUI. Nice, which gave me access to t'internet. Ubuntu provide their own Update Manager which checks for any new versions – useful as any
Operating System is out of date as soon as it's installed. Left that
running and I soon had a fully operational up-to-date system.

Graphics cards are traditionally where Linux fell down. A couple of years ago I had to recompile a kernel to get proper support. This time, I was left with good support, but still not optimum (I intended to play 3d games on my laptop). A quick visit to the ATI website got me a driver that was updated a fortnight ago. Sweet. Trepidation ensued as I wasn't sure of the nature of the driver. Kernel patch?

Configure,compile and install? Nope – just run, and it did all the work for me.

In previous years I've been used to manually installing code myself(I could type './configure, make, make install' in my sleep). Out of habit I started to do this with MySQL – a database server. Partway through I thought I'd check the Software 'repository' that's available to all Ubuntu users. Bingo – it's there. Selected it, downloaded it, installed it with minimal hassle.

The repositories give Ubuntu the equivalent of Windows Update on Steroids. Combined with the advanced package management it currently gives me access to approximately 12000
packages – old and new. Apart from the extra software, how is the package management different from Windows? The concept of 'dependency' is present. If you try to install a package that depends on other libraries then you'retold. Packaging systems like 'Synaptic' will download all the dependencies for you as well, but they all basically use the same
underlying system. All of this makes it easy to try out new applications without fear of breaking your machine – I've known dozens of Windows boxes groan under the pressure of too many Shareware apps that have been tried and uninstalled,leaving dross behind.

So at this point I've got a fully prepped machine with Sound, 3d Graphics, USB, and Network support. Software-wise, I've got a full Office Suite (OpenOffice), Email (Thunderbird) and Web (Firefox)support. All through a point and click interface. Everything fine and
dandy? Well for most folks this would be as much as they need, but I
need a little bit more. It's only fair I show you the stuff I had to
compile:

The default wireless network card drivers don't allow 'promiscuous mode' – one quick recompile of the open-source drivers and I was able to decrypt and sniff wireless networks.

Some beta security software hadn't made it into the Ubuntu repositories yet – they're wary of damaging software making it onto people's machines so err on the side of caution. I grabbed the source code from the web site, and installed it without any bother.

I recompiled the kernel to gain maximum efficiency. Whereas a system like 'XP Home Edition' will be written to cover as many configurations as possible, Linux's kernel can be tuned for a particular processor and can be made to take up as little space as possible.</p><p>No 'mom and pop' users will reinstall Windows from scratch – they usually have 'imaged CDs' that will repartition and format the drive before putting a fully-grown system back on. The same could be achieved with Linux. Once installed, both the systems allow for an average user to perform their duties – the only difference being that the'reinstall' CD will never be used for Linux – the system won't become broken