Ubuntu is here
Although Mike and Manny were making fun of the name last night, I have downloaded and installed the Ubuntu Linux distribution on the old desktop (Dell optiplex 2100) in the den.
Right now its just for testing. The computer was low end even when we bought it (4 years ago), so you can imagine how its running now (crappy).
Not sure what my plans for it are yet. I've heard alot of talk about ubuntu lately, so I figured why not? I put in all the effort to get a 2nd PC in the house up and in running condition, and it never gets any use. so as far as I'm concerned, it's up for grabs.
I figured I can put a wireless network card in it and move it up to my bedroom, but those are running in the $50 range these days. Still looking into options.
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Ubuntu is a great system. My beef with it is that stupid “sudo instead of root” idea. Maybe I’m old school but I just don’t like doing things this way. I usually enable normal root opeation right after I install:
sudo passwd rootBut that’s just me.
Re: wireless card – before you invest money in it, make sure that the card will work with linux. Setting up wireless is a major pain in the ass.
You most likely will need to use ndiswrapper and the windows drivers. You usually need two packages: ndiswrapper-utils and ndiswrapper-modules. The second one should be included Dapper’s kernel, so you just need to install utils.
If you don’t have the module loaded, you can always install from source. I recommend compiling it into deb packages insead of normal make+make install procedure. This way apt can keep track of the added packages and you can easily uninstall them later. I recently blogged about this.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006 at 9:56 am