Today I volunteered to help with the collection of supplies at the PA National Guard Armory to help out the victims of hurricane Katrina. For the most part it went pretty slow, but we collected a lot of stuff which is helpful. Most of the 3 hours I spent there was boring, with no cars pulling up to drop stuff off. I thought it was good that we helped out, but it was still a little boring nonetheless.
I’ve tried to write this review about 3 times already, and this time I’m going to write it for sure. Also, I know that I’m a little late reviewing Ubuntu, but I felt that I should do it anyhow, so shut the hell up and read.
The promise behind Ubuntu Linux is that it is easy to use and usr-friendly. For the most part, I found this to be true. From inserting the disk to logging in, the process took about 30 minutes. The Ubuntu installer does most everything for you, except you select what hard drive to install it to. It also offers some other more advanced options, but the default settings will be fine for most users. On login I was greeted with a simple and clean interface what was very functional and easy to navigate. Browsing throught the menus I found that Ubuntu comes bundled with a lot of useful software such as the fantastic OpenOffice.org office suite. The piece of included software that I found most useful was the Synaptic Package Manager. It functions like a WinZIP/Windows Installer hybrid program installing tarballs such as Windows would install EXE programs. There was one thing, however, that was so frustrating, it almost brought me to tears. It was trying to setup my wireless network. If you have a direct ethernet connection, then you’re good as gold. If you have a wireless PCI card with a Texas Instruments chipset like mine, then you are screwed. No matter what I did, it would not work. I’m sure that with more in-depth work you could get it to work using the wlan drivers package, but I found that even that did not work.
In my final thoughts, I would say that Ubuntu is a very good Linux distrobution if you don’t mind puttingi n a little work to get things up and running.
Got questions about Ubuntu/Linux? Email me: bacontheory@gmail.com
