dolson
March 4th, 2005, 04:52 AM
I've been running Ubuntu for a couple weeks now on my laptop, and almost a week now on my desktop.
Yeah, I'm a late-comer to the Ubuntu world, but I didn't have any drive space to backup all of my data to until recently, when I acquired a new 200GB hard drive.
What follows is probably more information than you'll ever care to read about a complete stranger.
That said, no doubt some of you might recognize me from the past. In my previous searches and readings of the forums via Google searches, I only noticed one nickname that I recognized, and that was cyberjackle...
Anyhow, for those who don't know me, or can't put your finger on it if you do, most people know me from that website called The Mandrake eXPerience (MDKXP, for short). Surprisingly, I still get email and IMs from people who still hit that site. If you were a Mandrake user previously, and didn't know about MDKXP, you might recognize me from my days with MUO/MUB/MUSB, both the message boards and IRC channels. You might know that I switched to Debian a couple years ago, and a short while later retired MDKXP.
I've always been a fan of testing out many distros, and Ubuntu was no exception. I tried it out on a spare 10GB hard drive that I pulled from my Xbox, and was very much impressed with how simple the install was. It picked up all my hardware and I was up and running in no time. Mind you, I have all standard hardware, easy to support in Linux, because I've been running nothing but Linux since mid-2002, and ran Linux for a good while before that as well. I was impressed since that time, and this was sometime last year, and ever since then I had it in the back of my mind to get a larger drive and switch to Ubuntu. Finally it happened.
I haven't abandoned Debian entirely, as I still think it has its place. I was consulted at work to choose between a few distros for production use, and naturally I went with Debian Woody. I have now deployed two systems there, and will be deploying more soon. I also run Woody on my home server, which I use as a web/FTP/etc server, as well as my own PBX.
But, for my home desktops, I'm going with Ubuntu, until I have reason to go back to Debian, which hopefully won't happen. I am not really a fan of distro-hopping (trying and experiencing many distros is different than hopping), but I really think that Ubuntu has the potential to take the number one spot for desktop use, at the very least. For me personally, it's still too new for server use, at least at work, where my lifeline depends on what choices I make.
I ordered a few CDs from the ShipIt system a while back, and when they finally came in, I wiped down my laptop and that's where it began. The next day, I ended up giving away 3 copies of the CD that I had ordered, so I had to order more. I know for sure that one of the copies has already been installed (into a warezed VMware, but still, it's a start, right?) and one of the other guys has booted the Live CD, and will probably install it soon. So I'm glad about that. Even before that, I had given away my burned copy of Warty, since I was expecting the pressed discs. I've been recommending Ubuntu ever since that first time I installed it, over everything else (including, not surprisingly, Debian), to Linux virgins. That just shows how much faith I have in this particular distribution. :)
I've gone through a few phases in my Linux life. The first one was obviously the discovery phase, where I could only really briefly test different distros on my parent's machines between Windows reinstalls. That was back in the day. I finally found a distro that helped me be able to dual-boot from a single partition - WinLinux 2000. I had good luck with that and even installed it on a number of machines in high school. When I got my own PC, I somehow ended up choosing Mandrake 7.0, and went from there on through the various releases, through to 9.0. That was the most loyalty I had to a distro, since Mandrake let me learn at my own pace, for the most part. Finally, after having failed miserably at a Debian Potato install a couple times, finally some people in a particular FreeNode channel helped me get past my issues. I got Debian Woody onto my desktop, and hadn't really reinstalled since. I learned a lot in the last couple years with Debian... Now I'm back to a Mandrake-type phase, where I want a distro that just works and takes care of all the little details that I had to figure out on Debian. I'm interested more in Linux now as a viable system for business and home use, as opposed to my own little hacker-type hobby. I'm still the same person, but I'm taking a more every-day, real-world approach to things. Maybe that's the reverse of what Linux users generally do, but I've always had a habit to go against the grain anyhow (and for those of you who know me, you know the truth to that statement is more like "rubbing the cat the wrong way").
I don't know how much I'll commit to being on these forums, and at best it'll be in spurts. I just don't have the time I used to have, especially while I was in college. In any case, here I am. I'm impressed with Ubuntu, but it's not perfect. I'm hoping to be a small part of the community who can watch it blossom into the number one distribution.
Yeah, I'm a late-comer to the Ubuntu world, but I didn't have any drive space to backup all of my data to until recently, when I acquired a new 200GB hard drive.
What follows is probably more information than you'll ever care to read about a complete stranger.
That said, no doubt some of you might recognize me from the past. In my previous searches and readings of the forums via Google searches, I only noticed one nickname that I recognized, and that was cyberjackle...
Anyhow, for those who don't know me, or can't put your finger on it if you do, most people know me from that website called The Mandrake eXPerience (MDKXP, for short). Surprisingly, I still get email and IMs from people who still hit that site. If you were a Mandrake user previously, and didn't know about MDKXP, you might recognize me from my days with MUO/MUB/MUSB, both the message boards and IRC channels. You might know that I switched to Debian a couple years ago, and a short while later retired MDKXP.
I've always been a fan of testing out many distros, and Ubuntu was no exception. I tried it out on a spare 10GB hard drive that I pulled from my Xbox, and was very much impressed with how simple the install was. It picked up all my hardware and I was up and running in no time. Mind you, I have all standard hardware, easy to support in Linux, because I've been running nothing but Linux since mid-2002, and ran Linux for a good while before that as well. I was impressed since that time, and this was sometime last year, and ever since then I had it in the back of my mind to get a larger drive and switch to Ubuntu. Finally it happened.
I haven't abandoned Debian entirely, as I still think it has its place. I was consulted at work to choose between a few distros for production use, and naturally I went with Debian Woody. I have now deployed two systems there, and will be deploying more soon. I also run Woody on my home server, which I use as a web/FTP/etc server, as well as my own PBX.
But, for my home desktops, I'm going with Ubuntu, until I have reason to go back to Debian, which hopefully won't happen. I am not really a fan of distro-hopping (trying and experiencing many distros is different than hopping), but I really think that Ubuntu has the potential to take the number one spot for desktop use, at the very least. For me personally, it's still too new for server use, at least at work, where my lifeline depends on what choices I make.
I ordered a few CDs from the ShipIt system a while back, and when they finally came in, I wiped down my laptop and that's where it began. The next day, I ended up giving away 3 copies of the CD that I had ordered, so I had to order more. I know for sure that one of the copies has already been installed (into a warezed VMware, but still, it's a start, right?) and one of the other guys has booted the Live CD, and will probably install it soon. So I'm glad about that. Even before that, I had given away my burned copy of Warty, since I was expecting the pressed discs. I've been recommending Ubuntu ever since that first time I installed it, over everything else (including, not surprisingly, Debian), to Linux virgins. That just shows how much faith I have in this particular distribution. :)
I've gone through a few phases in my Linux life. The first one was obviously the discovery phase, where I could only really briefly test different distros on my parent's machines between Windows reinstalls. That was back in the day. I finally found a distro that helped me be able to dual-boot from a single partition - WinLinux 2000. I had good luck with that and even installed it on a number of machines in high school. When I got my own PC, I somehow ended up choosing Mandrake 7.0, and went from there on through the various releases, through to 9.0. That was the most loyalty I had to a distro, since Mandrake let me learn at my own pace, for the most part. Finally, after having failed miserably at a Debian Potato install a couple times, finally some people in a particular FreeNode channel helped me get past my issues. I got Debian Woody onto my desktop, and hadn't really reinstalled since. I learned a lot in the last couple years with Debian... Now I'm back to a Mandrake-type phase, where I want a distro that just works and takes care of all the little details that I had to figure out on Debian. I'm interested more in Linux now as a viable system for business and home use, as opposed to my own little hacker-type hobby. I'm still the same person, but I'm taking a more every-day, real-world approach to things. Maybe that's the reverse of what Linux users generally do, but I've always had a habit to go against the grain anyhow (and for those of you who know me, you know the truth to that statement is more like "rubbing the cat the wrong way").
I don't know how much I'll commit to being on these forums, and at best it'll be in spurts. I just don't have the time I used to have, especially while I was in college. In any case, here I am. I'm impressed with Ubuntu, but it's not perfect. I'm hoping to be a small part of the community who can watch it blossom into the number one distribution.