There can be more than one...

Okay, I admit it. It finally happened to me. I'm converted, I've seen the world in a whole new light. It happened yesterday morning...reading through a number of my blogs I found a number of references to Ubuntu's new release 7.04 aka Feisty Fawn.

They had a handy LiveCD and I had a spare machine... One thing led to another and now I'm running it on 3 machines here in the house and planning how to migrate the other 9 or so.

I've been hollering at Microsoft to strip down their OS and sheer off the bells and whistles and give me a lean, efficient and stable OS. Charge me a reasonable amount for it and sell a lot of subscriptions for updates, applications and upgrades. Let the open source community go nuts on the source code and start cranking out competitive, inexpensive and community supported competitors for those services. You'll still make a buck when you sell the OS...but it's too late now. See how easy it is to get me started?

So, for the first time in about 3 years I sat down in front of a shiny new OS and said "Very nice." and "Well done!" or "Ah, that's how that's supposed to work..."

Maybe the shiny newness will wear off this weekend when I start digging deeper into apps but for right now I'd really suggest you get a copy of the LiveCD and give it a test drive.

I started off with a clone P4 3.0 with 1GB and a Gigabit LAN connection to the network and my 1.5Mb DSL (I know, but I really do live in the boonies.). 40GB Seagate SATA screaming away and a fairly advanced dual head X600 ATI card on the PCI-X bus.

The LiveCD came down in about 20-25 minutes, burned up in 5. Booted to the installer less than half an hour after I'd gotten the inkling.

I was gritting my teeth for the 80 column installs I'm mostly familiar with. But, they put on a nice show. The OS boots from the CD in a pretty full format you can fiddle with. The install is hand-holdy and doesn't really tell you what's going on, or why - but it gets it done.

I'm still feeling nervous that I don't have the latest and best drivers, but that's just my Windows hangover, I hope.

The install only took about 30 minutes from the first boot of the LiveCD - maybe an hour before I got back up to my first completed install. It seemed fast, then I realized it had pretty much skipped at least one, perhaps two restarts before getting me to that first full login. I guess that's one of the clever beauties of the LiveCD format - that fairly long load allowed it to figure out what to install without having to ask me a lot of questions...or any.

On the first install I tested out the XP boot, it was freakin' simple, it found it already, labeled it correctly - damn near everything. It worked, I knew what to choose to get where. XP came up quick as ever. Restarted and went back in to Ubuntu. Startup is fast and seems fairly efficient.

The first thing it does is look for updates, which it finds. I'd rather have some than none anyday - none means nobody is supporting it any more. I was expecting a long wait but it was a good 20 minutes. While those were loading up I started digging through the GUI controls and looking at system resources.

I'm not too fond of the default colors, and one of my biggest beefs with most Linux desktops was the need to edit lots of little .conf files to change the resolution, wallpaper and look and feel settings. The Feisty Fawn has a very nice slick desktop interface that's easy to navigate and I found fairly direct and straight forward. Sure there are quirks, and there are fewer options out of the box. Guess that's why it installs so quick!

And there, to my astonishment is my 40GB NTFS drive on the desktop! And I can totally use it. Nice! My XP Boot is intact on the drive and totally accessible. Okay, it's scary too, but good to know.

The network configured just right and I'm able to browse the network and access computers on the AD with my AD credentials. Out of the box...I just went to them, gave it my credentials and made some choices about how to store them locally. Boom - I'm browsing my XP workstation drive.

Firefox comes by default and runs well. Went ahead and installed my base set of plugins and extensions. Runs good...That's where I usually am anyway.

I'm still a little worried about stepping away from MS Office. It's still the business standard. I haven't been more than 85 or 90% with Google Docs. I'll see how much difficulty I have getting everything the way I like it in the pre-installed open office.

Some apps are loaded by default, a fairly nice selection, and there is already a nice library of applications available and lots more to be found searching the internet. Though, most of the non-debian packaged apps delv quickly in to .conf files and command line hacking (which I've kind of been missing, not enough in 2k and XP). This could be a breaking point. If I can't get my apps up and running the way I want I'll be going back to XP.

I've been enjoying it. It's hard to be intimidated by something called Feisty Fawn. I guess that was maybe the point. But I'm fairly impressed. It seems to fill a lot of the gaps MS has left out of their recent OS's and managed to build a good solid base of technologies to support the user and the developers. It seems solid, now. I'll let you know how it goes.

I think my next convert will be the AVServer - looking at MythTV and some others...more soon!