How hard does Ubuntu rock??

[faraaz]

Hi...this is a cool story I thought you guys would want to hear. So anyway, I had this laptop I bought in 2005 (Dell Inspiron 9100, 3.2 GHz P4, 1 GB RAM, 100 GB HDD, Radeon 9800 256 MB graphics).

I used it for a couple of years, but then the warranty expired, and soon after, my battery and hard drive crashed. So I called Dell and they said that I'd have to get my warranty extended if I wanted those parts fixed, AND that the warranty doesn't cover my battery so I'd have to pay for that as well. Total amount was around $ 350 US.

So I said screw that, opened it up and saw that Windows couldn't load because it said my hard drive had crashed. So I loaded up the Feisty live cd, ran some diagnostics with gparted, fdisk and some other utils...dont remember the names but I'd found this neat guide somewhere online, and found that my drive had some errors on it. It asked me if I wanted to fix them, so I did. Then I installed Ubuntu, rebooted...and OMGWTF it worked!!!! :KS

And if it hadn't WTFPWND Dell tech suppot and Windows already, it went one step further. Flawlessly recognized my ATI card, set up the correct widescreen resolution (1280x800), works brilliant with my wireless internet connection AND runs as fast as my Windows machine (2.4 GHz C2D, 2 GB DDR RAM, 300 GB SATA HDD & ATI Radeon X1650 256 MB graphics)...

My only regret is that I remembered about using Linux on this conked out laptop like a year ago...man, I LOVE UBUNTU!

[Swarms]

Hehe nice story, on my laptop, the wireless card doesn't work with XP, I have to replug it every time I boot the machine or it doesn't work, on Ubuntu, it works when I boot it.

[happy-and-lost]

It rocks harder than Rocky McRockRock, son of Lord Rocksworth, who attended Rocksbridge University and succesfully completed a degree in Rocking, after which he proceeded to rock harder than the rockers at the infamous Reading Rock Festival.

It rocks that much.

[wersdaluv]

It rocks as hard as Megadeth... I mean, even harder

[Mr. Picklesworth]

That's an impressive story :)

Ubuntu's quieter software does some pretty neat things really unexpectedly. For example, I learned a while ago that the forced disk check is actually good for something!
It ran when I was booting up and found a bit of corruption, didn't seem to care much about it. Next time I ran Aptitude, it told me that one of my packages was associated with that corrupted data and offered to reinstall it.

There is also the wonderful activity of reinstalling practically the entire operating system without shutting down, finding an installer CD or losing any of my own data. A catasrophic failure of some sort screwed everything up and the eventual solution was "aptitude reinstall ubuntu-desktop" or something along those lines. It succeeded, to my amazement. With that other operating system, I would have had to completely reinstall with the installer CD and start again. (Granted, it wouldn't have had that particular error, but I'm sure it would be quite painfully messed up in the time that system was installed).