There are few weekends in somebody's life that are unforgettable. Today is one of them for me. No, no, this is not sex related :). But maybe it is close. Well, I spent the whole day with Ubuntu Linux. And let me tell you it was a hell of an experience. I'm not a Linux newbie, but the surge of adrenaline pumping my heart, definitely qualified me as one.
I'm a redhatter for years now. I experiment a lot with Fedora and never bothered looking at any other distro. Until recently. Ok I stayed with Monopix for sometime but for the mere reason of testing mono development. mono is a port of Microsoft.net platform for Linux. The guy behind it,Miguel de Icaza, worth his own series of articles on my blog so I'll keep the details for then.
Confession here, I'm not anti-Microsoft and I make a living playing with their technologies.
It was not planned for me to use Ubuntu at all. Fridays are sacred days for me. I release all my tension, stress, and frustration through being a vegetable. A dead meat. I'm no Mahmood :) I don't do anything, unless the wife's beastie side comes out, then it is something else and let's avoid it for now :)
The best thing about Ubuntu is that you can boot from the CD and explore the system without any installations. It detected almost everything in my DELL PC and the system was functional in minutes after I put in the boot CD.
Partitioning a hard driver is always a difficult thing. Partition Magic, the universally used partitioning tool gave me lots of nightmares with Windows NTFS partitions throughout the years. Not with Ubuntu; the partitioning software is very good and you don't feel intimidated at all playing around with it. I shrunk my main NTFS partition and made room for Ubuntu.
The community behind Ubuntu is amazing. Was it luck that I stumbled by ubuntuguide.org website in the first google search looking for ubuntu guidelines? Maybe that's why I felt good about the community.
I just finished reading an article through digg.com that compared 3 Desktop ditros and Ubuntu came number one. Hurray
TAGS: Ubuntu, Linux, Desktop, Fedora, Community, ubuntuguide.org
4 comments:
That was funny Hasan, you make me sound like a tornado on the loose! Quite the contrary actually, I would love the chance to just sit and vegetate, but once in a while I actually have to get up and do something, and as through the working week I do do nothing, I might as well get up to something in the weekend! ;)
No seriously, thanks for the mention.
Like you, I've always been a RedHat guy, I've tried various other distros like Mandrake and a few others, but always came back to RH as it felt and looked much more professional and less gimmicky than the others.
However, I must confess that since I got the Macs with OS X, I've not looked at Linux on the desktop again, Mac is much more feasible to me and if and when I need a shell (to connect to any of my servers or do some digging inside the Mac) then a click brings it up and the familiar interface and the availability of the various other familiar tools like vi is comforting and efficient.
What an honor. The GODFATHER himself bothered to leave his den and comment on my little blog experiment. Thank you sir for being here :)
I do understand your ecstatic love relation with OS X. I don't really use it but I keep reading about it. And man; it is impressive.
Although my productivity is at its best on Windows, OSes are my passion and I experiment a lot with them. And I can tell you this, Ubuntu is different. It is not the technology though that distinguishes it from other platforms, but the huge and very supportive community behind it.
However, reading your blog and the tons of the good praises of OS X all over the web, I'm should confess that I’m really tempted. I managed to focus my productivity tools on open source software for the last few years and the strings that hook me to Windows are cut one after another. There is always the GAMING dilemma and Windows is still the only option out there at the moment for a hard-core gamer like me. I'll wait and see how Playstation 3 can make a difference. The moment I start enjoying games on some other platform, Windows on my desktop will definitely be a distant history.
Cool post.
I've tried all sorts of Linux distros, from user-compiled Gentoo to Ubuntu. All I can say is that Ubuntu is still running on my Pegasos II (PPC/G4) machine. I think they've succeeded in as you say Hasan, having it detect your hw without much fiddling.
As for BSD-based OS X, there can be no denying that it has done for POSIX/Unix-like systems what Linux is trying to do: Bring it to the desktop.
Thank you for your comment Hisham. It is so joyful seeing BSD back on the scene with a big bang. My first ever exposure to a unix/linux OS was BSDi and I acquired tons of skills crashing it to its knees and making it stand up all over again. It was a rock solid platform and will always be. I got paid well for enjoying this and my career path was set then; in the realm of a BSDi server :)
Now seeing how OS X is gaining popularity and the Mac on Intel thingy being a match made in heaven, I wonder if Microsoft stands a chance in the coming decade.
Nonetheless, it is always good to see Open Source spirit around and I salute you Hisham for having Ubuntu as a choice.
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