Unix, Linux, any sort of *nix. I've always thought it was for the mega geeks, the ones like in the films, so deprived of sunlight their skin is almost transparent and talk like "Comic Book Guy" from The Simpsons.
When my parents first got a PC in '93 (a 486SX 25Mhz if you wondered) It was MS-DOS 5, and Windows 3.1. Command lines were a pain in the ass and I was happy to see less and less of them. But the *nix's seemed to want to stay black with a flashy cursor. Do people really want command lines, or does it just make them feel special because it does kind of make you like "cooler" in an odd nerdy type way? Anyway... enough my old *nix prejudice. On to Ubuntu.
I've heard bits and pieces about Ubuntu for a couple of years now, always coupled with the funky code names. But never really saw it in action. Then John B showed me it installed on an old Dell Latitude he had and I have to admit it looked pretty sweet.
I recently upgraded my PC and kept all the old components to use on a MAME cabinet (AMD Athon 2700+, nForce2 motherboard, 1GB RAM, old but still not too shabby). After seeing Ubuntu I thought it would be a perfect chance to try and it out and maybe use it permanently for my MAME project. So that's what I did tonight. Here's it at the login screen:
At first it wouldn't even boot into the OS, it kept freezing. That caused my first outburst "bloody open-source crap..." etc. But it wasn't Ubuntu's fault, the machine kept freezing after about a minute of being turned on, must be to do with it being naked and case-less. So I gave everything a wiggle and away it went.
It booted into the "Live" OS within 2 minutess, wow. From dead PC to GUI and everything in a couple of minutes. Impressive. Selected the install option and off it went, it found the HDD connected to the SATA controller which made me very happy. I was chuffed because it's a Sil3112 SATA/RAID controller, and that isn't part of XP's initial clean install drivers. So even though I don't use a floppy drive, every time I wanted a nice clean XP install, I would have to dig out the floppy (and even harder, find a disk) load it up with the drivers and catch Windows with an F6 at the very first moment or it wouldn't find a HDD. Effort. And Floppy was your only option (apart from slipstreaming them into the CD).
Anyway, the full install couldn't have been any longer than 20 minutes and it was done. Amazing. XP was a good 45mins at least.
One problem though, the mouse wouldn't work, but even though there was a little rant "poxy open-source rubbish...", I think now it might be a dead rodent, I'll get a new one tomorrow. I still managed to have a play with keyboard navigation and I liked what I saw, everything seemed to have drivers for it, the screen res was already the LCD's native, I had sound, FireFox was there as was OpenOffice, all on 1 CD (not DVD) and installed in no time. Again impressive.
But it's not all good. Ubuntu is marketed as linux for the masses, you don't need to be the clammy skinned nerd, but I think you at least need one as a friend. A couple of examples:
I want to use the S-Video out on my graphics card to run a TV (the TV that would be my MAME Cabinet display) so I downloaded ATI's linux drivers. Could I just run them? Nope. The file extension didn't even seem recognised. Looking to the net for help was a quite baffling too. Enabling restricted drivers or something, and then more command-line stuff, with cryptic commands (At least DOS seemed kind of readable, maybe it's just what you're used to).
So I'm undecided, I love the install doing everything, doing it well and doing it in minutes. I like the look and feel. The updates and upgrades seem easy to do which is nice. But there's still that underlying command line requirement which I just don't feel like I want to learn. But it was only a couple of hours of playing, I'll give it another go tomorrow when I have a mouse and report back how i get on.
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