From the moment I bought my new laptop I’ve been struggling with Vista. Not because it’s not intuitive, or I hate the way it looks, or because it is so different from previous versions, or it’s more expensive than other OS’s. I’ve been struggling because I bought a brand spankin’ new laptop and it’s sluggish.
$1,299 bought me a beautiful little Red Sony Vaio with an Intel Core2 Duo (2.00GHz) with 2 GB RAM and Vista Home Premium. Vista “rates” my system at a 3.1. All the menus are slow to load, I sometimes wait close to 15 seconds for something that used to be instantaneous in XP. I’ve gone in and turned off all kinds of shiny whatchamacallits and whosamagiggies and the system is better but not great. I also can’t seem to get through the whole process of burning a DVD from my digital JVC home videos using several different tools. Also Photoshop CS3 is so slow I’m thinking of trying to install Photoshop 5.5 again but it’s probably not going to run on Vista. Oh the humanity…
So, back to my title. I have another laptop. The one that I replaced with the new VAIO. What to do. In the course of dealing with Vista, I decided to seek an alternative. A lot of ColdFusion folks are blogging about how great Macs are and I would have considered going down that route but you must own Apple hardware in order to install and run a Mac OS. That lead me to Linux. I have in the past installed a few flavors and managed to get one or two up and running years ago but once it was running, I found it not very intuitive to use. At least for me, that has all changed with Ubuntu 7.10. I can’t recall where I had heard of this flavor but in general, I got the notion that it was something special.
I visited the site: Ubuntu.com and downloaded the 7.10 Desktop .ISO version. I slapped in a blank CD and in a couple of minutes had an install CD. less than 20 minutes later I was up and running with a brand new OS. The bare minimum RAM for this is only 256MB as opposed to Vista’s 2GB (Vista really requires 4GB if you ask me). This OS is intuitive, comes with a clean desktop, firefox and mail, graphical software panel for adding and removing software to your system, OS updater which checks for the latest patches, a list of already installed applications such as games, graphics programs like GIMP, Pidgin (formally GAIM) for instant messaging, Open Office, Movie player, Music Manager, Photo Manager etc. The thing that most impressed me is that it recognized all my hardware and I was able to browse my windows networked drives with no trouble.
I pulled up the Rhythmbox Music Player and told it where my music files were on the network and it indexed them and I was up and listening to Paramore’s Riot in minutes. I installed eclipse by going to [applications], Add/Remove, then choosing “All available applications” and then typing in eclipse in the search box. I ticked the Eclipse option, then Applied Changes and in 2 or three minutes I was up and running with version 3.2
I wanted to “map a drive”, as I would call it in Windows. After a quick search, I came across this little posting and in minutes I had a “mapped drive” to my little NAS.
I’m not ready to say that this is going to be my development box of choice just yet. It’s all still very new to me. I will however say that I’ve never been so taken by a linux-based OS as I have with this one.
I’ll continue to blog about my experiences building ColdFusion applications using the Ubuntu OS as time goes on.
Download your new OS now!
Vince Collins
