Ubuntu trials - Part the First

One of many things I’ve neglected to write about is my adventures with Linux this summer. As I was forced (oh so willingly) into having my first summer off in 10+ years, I knew I needed projects to keep from boredom. While drinking mass quantities of tequila may be considered a project to some, I set my goals slightly higher.

I played around with the ideas of writing some Firefox extensions, such as porting PicArray over, or fixing DownloadSort to be able to treat upper- and lower-case extensions the same. I also thought of offering my limited coding skills to the PRMM project. Then I thought of the hobbies I’ve neglected, such as the guitar, painting, movie editing, cooking, and many others. I dabbled around until I thought of the perfect one. (One is more than enough for me and my ant-length attention span.) I decided to make a real go at using Linux as my desktop (for the umpteenth time).

Before I had shot at it from the sidelines. Over the years I’ve installed various distros: Suse, Slackware, RedHat, etc. All of them for various reasons, Suse had a huge native application list that installed with it, Slackware was for “power users and tweakers”, RedHat was for the masses. But this time, I wanted to actually not just putz around with it, but I wanted to use it as much as possible. This is a goal that’s difficulty is inversely proportional to how many things you do on a computer. I happen to do alot. I have a bazillion applications that I use weekly that are tweaked just-so in Windows to my tastes. Not to mention I have tweaked Windows far beyond what a normal user would do. My goal with Linux this time was to attempt to be able to do everything I can in Windows, and hopefully better.

I chose the Ubuntu distro for two reasons, one is: my school (University of Texas) had switched the majority of the Linux machines in the Computer Science area to Ubuntu. First Breezy, and more recently to Dapper. The second reason is that the Ubuntu community seems to be more active, or at least more prolific, and in technical matters, I’ve always found the best help from other users in an active community. So, I go to the Ubuntu site, and peruse their offerings. I look at the live CDs and choose one I think is appropriate to my machine, an AMD64 build of Dapper Drake… my first mistake.

I fired up the LiveCD and played around with it. I was duly impressed; things had progressed much since the last time I had tried Linux as a desktop (I have used it as a web server and FTP server for years, but as a desktop it’s been 3-4 years since I’ve tried it). Ubuntu was sharp and snappy, and the included apps were very impressive. So, I started to look into installing it permanently. I had cleared a bunch of space on one of my non-booting SATA drives, as I had heard there was something akin to Partition Magic that could resize my partitions to allow a Linux install. It turns out it is much better: qtparted. This little utility comes with the LiveCD and will repartition on-the-fly using unused space. No need to defragment beforehand or anything. Not only that, it totally resized and added two partitions in less than 5 minutes. I think it was closer to 2 minutes. I am impressed yet again.

Then I get on to the install. Snappy, quick, and its done. The result was a much faster Ubuntu than the LiveCD, obviously, and time to get myself in real trouble… installing applications to make it my own. AMD64 Ubuntu is dual booted and ready. It loads up on a non-primary SATA drive on the last partition on it, and runs perfectly. Time to screw things up!

More on that in the next installment.