Second impressions
Back when summer was at hand, I mentioned that I’d downloaded a new distribution of Linux, and gave my impressions based on a couple of hours with an older computer as the platform. Today, with a bit of free time on my hands, I decided to revisit the Ubuntu community.
This time, I was able to up the ante, in using a new computer with a flat screen that is kept around for test purposes. I grabbed a fresh hard drive from the tech cupboard and fifteen minutes later my login prompt was ready. This is already an improvement over a normal installation of everybody’s favourite here (XP PRO).
With almost six months elapsed since the ISO of “Dapper Drake” was downloaded, it was time to check for updates. After all, we are talking about a generation’s span for anyone other than the gang up in Redmond. Sure enough, a new version was available, but this software simply went off like a well-trained retriever, and with another twenty minutes gone by, the machine now has Ubuntu 6.10 as its distribution. “Edgy Eft” is cleaner, with updates on OpenOffice and FIrefox.
The updating via apt-get is still unfamiliar territory for me; without a tarball and a few make scripts how can you hope to install new software? Well, you say what you want, and it just appears. This is great, as soon as you figure out what to ask for…
Networking is great. I established a login to our Active Directory domain, a SSH session to a machine in my basement and a RDP session to my other desktop machine, so that I could surf the web with more resources than anyone else in the office.
I didn’t swap in a DVD drive yet, but there’s always later in the week.
