Ubuntu and me

Ubuntu Dapper was officially released today. I wish I had an extra machine laying around so I could do an install… sigh. Here's the story of Ubuntu Linux and me.

First, if you're not familiar with Ubuntu, it is a free Linux distribution (a free operating system) based on Debian (another popular distribution). Ubuntu is known for being very user friendly. For most systems, it works out of the box — the wifi card works, the sound card works, the video card works, etc. This hasn't been the case with other Linux distributions. Over the last year, Ubuntu has become probably the most famous Linux distribution, mostly for the reasons I just described.

I stumbled upon Ubuntu through complete coincidence. I had an old HP laptop that  had slowed to the point of uselessness (I installed Limewire… big mistake). I couldn't get the system restore CDs to work. Worse, I'd had the same problem the year before, and I only managed to resolve it by ordering a new hard drive. I wasn't about to do that again (the warranty was up and I just bought an iBook). So, for the first time in my life, I had a spare computer, and decided to try Linux. I didn't know much about Linux (still don't, really),  so I went searching for a distribution. They were all either costly (not expensive, but I didn't want to pay anything) or so large that I didn't have the patience to download them. Then I stumbled upon Ubuntu, which I'd never heard of before (the buzz about Ubuntu hadn't taken off by then). I downloaded it and burned the iso on my iBook.

I'm one of the most computer literate people I know, but I've never had to work much with hardware, drivers and other core stuff, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I popped in the CD, booted, and went through the install process. It was easy — the installer wasn't graphical back then, but I didn't have to do anything. After about 30 minutes it was finished. And to my amazement, the machine booted and everything worked. Except I didn't have any internet access. So I rebooted. And boom: I was connected to the internet. I didn't know how to take a screenshot on Ubuntu, so I snapped a photo with my phone and posted it to my blog. It was a picture of Yahoo.com running in Firefox on Ubuntu. Such a proud moment.

Ubuntu comes preloaded with everything that a casual user might need: Firefox, Evolution (for email), OpenOffice.org, a media player, a text editor (gEdit), a PDF viewer, an image viewer, an image editing suite (Gimp), etc. And installing new software is easy. You can use apt-get via the command line, but to use Ubuntu, you don't really need to know anything about using the shell. You can install new applications directly from the Synaptic Package Manager. I changed the universe (the list of mirrors from which SPM will install software) to include unsupported sources, and installed R, Maxima, Octave, Gretl, LaTeX, Kyle and a few other programs. Since Synaptic Package Manager is essentially a frontend to apt, you don't have to worry about managing dependencies (all of the files that you need for your programs to work are downloaded when you automatically install the program).

I bought a big book about Linux, but I soon discovered that I didn't really need to know most of the information. Everything that I needed to do, I could do from Gnome (the graphical user interface installed by default). I learned the basics of using the shell, just for fun, and changed a few configuration files here and there, but overall, using Ubuntu felt like using Windows, except that (a) it didn't crash, (b) it was faster and (c) I had a sense of pride about using a completely open-source system.

If you're thinking about trying out Linux, I would highly recommend Ubuntu. I deferred for a long time before finally trying it out, and in the end I waited until I had an extra machine laying around before I took the jump — a luxury that not everyone can afford (including me at present). And I haven't made the permanent switch — OS X is my current primary OS. But if uncertainty has been keeping you from playing around with Linux, these are the lessons that I learned when using Ubuntu:

• You will have to do some configuration. But this is no more difficult than making a few simple edits to an occasional text file. Nothing to be afraid of
• All of my drivers worked. Yours may not, but Ubuntu has become so popular that there is ample support on the net with easy-to-follow directions. Unless you're running a system that you built yourself, there's a good chance that you'll be able to get everything working on your computer
• Installing new software is very easy. First you point, then you click. If you're uptight about having local copies of your software, you can download the files and burn them to CD
• If your main computing tasks are surfing the web, writing text documents, creating spreadsheets and sending email, you'll never have to use the command line. If you go beyond that, you may need to use the command line, but you'll find that the commands that you need to know are all very basic and well documented
• Linux isn't ugly. Some people think that because it was put together by geeks, no thought has been paid to aesthetics, which do matter if you spend hour after hour on your computer. Fortunately, geeks have finally realized that aesthetics matter after all, so careful attention has been paid to the user interface
• The amount of available, free software is greater than the amount of free and commercial software for Windows. If there's a tool you might want, it exists in some form for Ubuntu

I did have a few problems, but you'll see that they weren't so bad:

• Some applications did not create new shortcuts when they were installed. But it was easy to add shortcuts manually. Also, I believe this may have been fixed since I last used Ubuntu
• Flash kept crashing Firefox. That was annoying
• Webpages display differently because the default fonts are not Times and Arial. They don't look bad, just different
• I had a difficult time getting certain types of media files to play. Specifically, I couldn't get sound from WMV files
• I could not get in install of Nvu that didn't require me to navigate to the proper directory and type "./nvu". I understand that Nvu is now part of the supported software universe, though

So go try it out. You'll thank me, because [danger: unfounded prediction ahead] within five years, a lot of people will be switching to Linux, and Ubuntu will be the distribution of choice for many of them. So if you try it out now, not only will you be freeing yourself from commercial software, you'll be investing in skills that will pay off in the near future.