Last week my laptop was happily refusing to boot into Windows Vista because it has been deactivated due to some troubleshooting I had to do. To keep it short, I had compressed the main drive in witch Vista was installed and could not boot. I then had to use an old Vista pre-release DVD to restore the boot loader, however not using the same disk as for the install might of proven itself to be a big mistake.
Nevertheless, I was not ready to move back to Windows XP and decided to install the latest version of Ubuntu on my laptop. I have been testing the various versions of Ubuntu since version 4.10 and I thank the Lord that they have made so many progress in the past few years. Everything works smoothly, all my hardware was detected and even my on-board wireless card was flagged as using proprietary drivers (still worked fine). The Ubuntu install CD lets you run a live version of the OS directly from the CD and gives you the option to install the OS on the hard drive.
I love the nice graphical effects you can add using Compiz, by now you must of seen a video of this on YouTube, with a spinning cube, rain or windows spinning around. Most of these are distractors from the main purpose that is stability and ease of use.
None of this is new really, I know how OpenOffice works but in order to be productive I’ll have to forget about those nice improvements Microsoft Office 2007 provided. It will be a bumpy ride, but I am to think that for a laptop on which I will not do any serious gaming there is no reason why Linux cannot take it’s rightful place as an alternate OS.
