My laptop has had a hidden “service” partition on it since I’ve had it, so in a fit of tidying up files, instead of handing the space over to Windows, I decided to chuck Ubuntu on it. It’s been ages since I had a play around with Linux, so I thought it was worth a punt.
First things first – the installation took no more than twenty minutes from start to finish (once I’d worked out the finer points of the number of partitions it wanted).
I got onto my wifi network in no time at all – and unlike a Windows installation, the computer now had a decent variety of Office-type applications as well as graphics amps like the GIMP.
All very good. One of the annoying things with a new Windows computer is that it immediately sets about downloading loads of updates which tends to annoy you on a new computer. Well to be honest, it’s not much different here. 164 downloaded and installed files later, and a single reboot, and I finally was up and running.
I did have install Flash (although I did that before my auto-update), but otherwise most things were working well.
But I did have trouble with the BBC’s site. RealPlayer wasn’t installed, and installing the open Helix did not seem to help with listening to streaming radio. After a certain amount of fiddling around I was finally able to install RealPlayer, after first uninstalling Helix. It occurs to me that the last time I was typing UNIX command file expressions was 1990 when I was doing things like downloading the complete IMDB from newsgroups and “installing” it locally on my £10k Sun workstation (Incidentally, you can still download IMDB files and install them locally on a machine). I think it’s fair to say that to this date, I’ve not used a more expensive machine – certainly none that just sat on my desktop for my sole use.
Anyway, I digress. I had a bit more of a play around but ended up giving up playing back any audio. Needless to say Virgin Radio worked fine – with the Flash version of the player being automatically chosen. This version of the Virgin Radio player also happily works in the Wii and PS3 (BTW – I note that the PS3 is already being “discounted” to £399 which, while only being a £26 reduction, is practically unheard of with a new launch machine, and just shows quite how much Sony has misjudged the machine’s pricing. Will we get any accurate sales information? I certainly won’t be buying the stories about how Sony has flooded the market with enough stock to ensure that purchasers are left short. They wanted a complete sellout – make no mistake. Stores should not have to be discounting within days of any product’s launch).
So there we go. A dual-boot XP/Ubunutu Linux machine in no time at all. I don’t know how useful the alternative operating system will really be, but I must admit that if someone just wanted a cheap laptop for surfing the net, doing their email and writing the odd letter, then it’d be perfect without the need for all the wastefulness of Windows (always assuming your inkjet printer of choice has drivers that will work). It’s interesting that Dell’s now offering Linux flavoured laptops, although I must admit that I couldn’t find them for sale anyway on the UK website.