Speaking of penguins…
By Marc Perton
While Ryan may have boldly switched over to the Jobs OS, I’ve recently gone the other way. No, I haven’t abandoned OSX or XP; I’ve got boxes running both (or rather, I’ve got boxes running each; no dual-OS Intel box for me—yet). But when the hard drive on my venerable HP Omnibook 510 notebook gave up the ghost recently, I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on a replacement drive, instead of XP (and instead of buying another laptop; I got this one on eBay for about $150 a couple of years ago, and it’s served me well). I had practical reasons for doing so—one of the main ones being that the five-year-old laptop was pretty sluggish under XP (despite the fact that it came with XP Pro preinstalled, with just a 1.13 GHz processor and 640 MB RAM, it was starting to show its age). That, and I didn’t have any install or recovery discs, and I wasn’t willing to deal with jumping through the many hoops required to get replacements from HP. So, Linux it would be. Installing went relatively smoothly—though relatively is, er, a relative term. Since I don’t have a CD-ROM for the 510, I decided the easiest thing would be to install directly to the hard drive by hooking it up to a desktop with one of those newfangled IDE-to-USB cables. I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu, burned it to a CD, and rebooted my desktop. After the obligatory BIOS tweak, the PC booted from the Ubuntu CD, and I ran the installer. About a half hour later, I had a working Ubuntu drive, which I slotted into my laptop. And here’s where the relative part comes in: Though Ubuntu has a well-deserved reputation for being easy to install and use, that rep is based largely on the assumption that you’re going to install it directly to a computer from a CD, not to a drive that you’ll then be installing in a different computer. Bottom line: I ended up having to edit the GRUB menu to recognize the new drive as hda1, since the installer had automatically set it up as sda1. Hardly major, but I was glad I knew how to do it. So, now I’m a happy Ubuntu user. And I really am happy. Last time I tried using a desktop version of Linux was about six years ago, and I found it to be more trouble than it was worth (I was using Caldera OpenLinux, from the company now known as SCO Group—and also known for suing Linux distributors for allegedly violating its patents). Ubuntu is a completely different beast, with a ton of preinstalled software, including Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the usual suite of Gnome apps. The few Microsoft apps I need for work (Outlook, Project) all function reasonably under Wine. And the software has recognized just about every peripheral I’ve thrown at it, from USB pen drives to a PCMCIA WiFi card. If this is the future of desktop Linux, Microsoft—and Apple—had better watch out.
While Ryan may have boldly switched over to the Jobs OS, I’ve recently gone the other way. No, I haven’t abandoned OSX or XP; I’ve got boxes running both (or rather, I’ve got boxes running each; no dual-OS Intel box for me—yet). But when the hard drive on my venerable HP Omnibook 510 notebook gave up the ghost recently, I decided to install Ubuntu Linux on a replacement drive, instead of XP (and instead of buying another laptop; I got this one on eBay for about $150 a couple of years ago, and it’s served me well). I had practical reasons for doing so—one of the main ones being that the five-year-old laptop was pretty sluggish under XP (despite the fact that it came with XP Pro preinstalled, with just a 1.13 GHz processor and 640 MB RAM, it was starting to show its age). That, and I didn’t have any install or recovery discs, and I wasn’t willing to deal with jumping through the many hoops required to get replacements from HP. So, Linux it would be. Installing went relatively smoothly—though relatively is, er, a relative term. Since I don’t have a CD-ROM for the 510, I decided the easiest thing would be to install directly to the hard drive by hooking it up to a desktop with one of those newfangled IDE-to-USB cables. I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu, burned it to a CD, and rebooted my desktop. After the obligatory BIOS tweak, the PC booted from the Ubuntu CD, and I ran the installer. About a half hour later, I had a working Ubuntu drive, which I slotted into my laptop. And here’s where the relative part comes in: Though Ubuntu has a well-deserved reputation for being easy to install and use, that rep is based largely on the assumption that you’re going to install it directly to a computer from a CD, not to a drive that you’ll then be installing in a different computer. Bottom line: I ended up having to edit the GRUB menu to recognize the new drive as hda1, since the installer had automatically set it up as sda1. Hardly major, but I was glad I knew how to do it. So, now I’m a happy Ubuntu user. And I really am happy. Last time I tried using a desktop version of Linux was about six years ago, and I found it to be more trouble than it was worth (I was using Caldera OpenLinux, from the company now known as SCO Group—and also known for suing Linux distributors for allegedly violating its patents). Ubuntu is a completely different beast, with a ton of preinstalled software, including Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the usual suite of Gnome apps. The few Microsoft apps I need for work (Outlook, Project) all function reasonably under Wine. And the software has recognized just about every peripheral I’ve thrown at it, from USB pen drives to a PCMCIA WiFi card. If this is the future of desktop Linux, Microsoft—and Apple—had better watch out.
August 6th, 2007 05:31
[...] a year ago, I ripped out the hard drive on a rapidly aging laptop and replaced it with a new one on which I [...]