So, I just installed Ubuntu on an old laptop someone gave me (PIII, 1Ghz, 256 ram). Old. And I don’t have a copy of Windows for it, so I went the free and hopefully easy route. I went with the stable 6.06 (Dapper Drake) version. It was an easy install. It’s a live CD, so you boot to the CD, and can test drive it if you want, but I don’t care about that so I clicked on the install icon, and answered 6 questions. It could have been more questions had I wanted more than one partition. Possibly 7 or 8 questions. So it chugged along for about 20? minutes. I rebooted, and presto! It is similar enough to Windows that I have no problem finding things. I even right-clicked on the desktop out of habit to change it and it gave me just what I was expecting. By far, the nicest Linux installation I’ve ever done.
It’s reasonably fast, especially for such an old computer.
I plugged in my ethernet connection. And waited for something to happen. I was wasting time. It was connected and waiting for me to hop on the internets.
I plugged in my external USB hard drive. It recognized the drives and popped them on my desktop for my browsing pleasure.
I downloaded and installed Firefox 2.0. The install was so fast thought I messed up something and it didn’t work, but no.
My only complaint so far: I understand the purity of nothing but open source, freely available stuff and you don’t want to mess that up, but you’re never going to take over the world with an installation that doesn’t play mp3s out of the box. Add another question to the installation outlining your position if you want, pop up a notice when I click on add programs, something.
Right now I’m updating my software, since it’s the older version it’s not surprising that there are 60 updates. It took about 10 minutes.
Friday I’ll try out a wifi card and see if it can handle that seamlessly.
To sum up, I like it. So far. I’d even recommend it if you want to switch over and are lazy like me, not particularly wanting to get all gritty learning new-fangled ways.
Not So Fast 
Did you install Automatix? An Ubuntu installation isn’t really complete without it. But once it’s installed, you’re in pretty good shape. The only problem I had was that it would stop recognizing the local network. Did fine on the Internet, but not the local connection.
Huh. Looks nifty. Thanks.
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