My Dell laptop is now happily cruising along with a new, fresh install of Ubuntu 7.04. It’s so much better than XP on that machine. Why did I switch to that OS? Read on, if you dare.
The story begins with my ailing Dell 5100. The laptop has had some issues with its RAM for the past couple months. There is 512MB of it in there, which was adequate for that machine (Pentium 4), but for some reason, it had been flaking out and only seeing 256MB. I used to be able to shut it down, swap memory sticks, and then the bios would see 512 again, but that workaround stopped working after a while. I ran memory tests on each chip, and they both checked out fine. BIOS is current and I’m still not sure what the problem is. But the bottom line was that 256MB of RAM was just not enough to run XP Pro. It would take about 15 minutes for the machine to fully boot up, which was just too long. And once I was “in”, each program I launched would just make the HDD churn like crazy. The 5100 is the machine I use to watch Japanese dorama on in the bedroom, but because of the lack of memory, it was just too much of a hassle to start up and use.
What about the iBook? Well, the Mac is great for web browsing and email/IM, but that machine is not powerful enough to play the dorama I watch, which is usually encoded using Divx or Xvid in a resultion of at least 704x396. In fact, most Flash video like the vids on YouTube are too choppy to view. It’s a nice little laptop, but it’s old, old I tell you! (Mariko, I want a new Macbook!)
The solution to my problem (no, not a new Macbook) was to install Ubuntu on the machine. Ubuntu is a completely free flavor of Linux, and has a nice GUI and tons of apps. Just looking on their webpage made it look like the perfect solution. Plus, I had just read an excellent article by Ashton Mills about using Ubuntu instead of Windows for normal tasks. It pretty much convinced me to take the plunge. (continue reading by clicking the “read more” link below)
Installing Ubuntu is easy, if you do it the right way. I thought I was doing it the right way, but I wasn’t, and it took me a few hours to figure out the real right way to do it. Mind you, this is probably just a quirk of my laptop, but the normal install just would not work. Basically, you are supposed to burn a disk image to cd, then boot from it. This will take you into a runtime Ubuntu environment, and from there you can kick off the installer. I got up to this point without a hitch. However, the installer was taking way too long. The computer would keep reading from the disc, and it would draw the first dialog box ever so slowly. I think it took about 45 minutes to see the first step (out of seven). It said it would only take a few minutes, but I let it go for a few hours before giving up. I thought that maybe something was wrong with the disc, so I burned a new one, this time using a dvd-r. That gave me the same results. Finally, I downloaded the “Alternate Desktop CD”, which is a text-based installer. I booted from this, and flew through all of the steps, which included setting the language, timezone, keyboard settings, partitioning the hard disk (bye-bye XP!), and installing the OS. It took about 30 minutes to complete the entire install. That is the right way to do it.
But I was not out of the woods yet. The main convenience of the laptop is that I can wirelessly connect to my home network, and access the videos which are on my desktop computer. Ubuntu connected via cable to the network without a hitch. It was able to obtain an IP and could see all the shared folders. The wireless card took some massaging, however. Fortunately, there is a bunch of information out there to help with the setup of my particular card (Belkin F5D7011 802.11g Plus). Unfortunately all that information didn’t quite solve the problem fully. In fact, I had to try out several drivers before I found one that would actually power on the card. At least I got to brush up on my L337 UNIX command skillz. So at this point, the card would power on and could see the names of the neighborhood wireless routers, but on trying to connect to our home router, it would just spin and spin, never obtaining an IP address, although it did prompt me to enter in the WEP key. I could, however, connect to someones unprotected router. By sheer dumb luck, I stumbled upon the solution. Although our home network is using 128-bit WEP security, and I chose that option in the dialog box when trying to connect, I needed to choose 128/64-bit encryption as the security type. I would have never thought to click on that dropdown to switch security schemes, but a happy trackpad accident led me there. Once I did that, it connected! Go figure…
So then I a fully functional Ubuntu build on my 256MB Pentium 4 laptop. Once the wireless network was going, I downloaded all the updates, then started installing software and configuring my mail, IM, and bookmarks for Firefox. Everything runs so fast. The OS itself takes less than a minute to load (from pressing the power button). Firefox starts up in maybe two seconds, and renders web pages instantly. It’s amazing. I installed VLC and all the necessary codecs, but used the included movie player (can’t remember the name of it) to watch my dorama. It is great! Now, the only thing I am having trouble with is that although I can connect to network shares using the Nautilus file browser, the VLC “open dialog box” does not allow me to reach the network shares. This is essential, because the dialog box is the only way to load subtitles. I gotta figure how to browse the network from that dialog box…
In conclusion, I am very happy with Ubuntu. So far, it’s fast, stable, and attractive. Not as nice looking as OS X, but it’s servicable, and seems to be highly customizable. I will have to play around with that later. There are tons of apps for it, including Office compatible programs, and an active online user community ready to help out if you need it. I highly recommend Ubuntu, especially for slower machines that have trouble running Windows.