FindComputerStuff

After I lost my Fedora Core 3 CDs due to poor storage, I started hunting for places to get a replacement. Somehow, nobody in my immediate vicinity even knew anything about linux. I had a few LiveCD ISO’s on hard disk (SuSE 9.2 Live, DSL, SLAX 5.0, Mandrake Live, Tomsrtbt, etc), but using them made me feel somehow crippled. I needed a fully fledged distro i could install, with GCC, Wine, KDE, XMMS, video codecs, full suite of network tools, and drivers for my Wireless LAN Card (i hate having to compile drivers if i can avoid it). Asking around was fruitless - people were like “Linux? huh? what’s that?” And my poor shared 64Kbps connection could not download the 5 FC3 ISO’s. What a shame. I was strolling the corridors of Nairaland When i noticed that someone mentioned that there was a company, www.canonical.com, that was shipping Linux CDs for free, to anywhere in the world. The distro name? Ubuntu Linux.

I immediately made an order, expecting to receive the disks in like 3 weeks, or never - the Nigerian Postal Agency here is not very efficient. To my surprise, I got it in 7 days! And they sent 5 packs of 2 disks each, a LiveCd and an install Cd. I tried the liveCD first, and although the CDROM read speed slowed things a bit, I was still impressed by the smooth bootup process, and the squeaky clean interface. It came with the GNOME desktop environment, although I would have loved to have KDE. The site also offered a KDE based CD (Kubuntu), but i was only available as a download.

The first thing that hooked me was the Exchange Connector in Evolution - it connected to our Exchange Server without hassles, it was such a wonderful experience. And the drivers for two different wireless cards were already in, all i had to do was set the wep key and SSID, and I was back on the company intranet. With SuSE 9.2, i had to use ndiswrapper to load the Windows drivers for one card, and Fedora Core 3 told me I had to recompile and recompile and recompile to use either card - one was based on the Atheros chipset, the other on Texas Instruments’ acx-100 chipset. Ubuntu even let me connect to the HP printer through the OfficeJet print server. I was tripped.

I was so excited, i removed the CD and decided to use the install Disk straightaway. I cleaned out a 15GB partition on my harddrive, and then split it into three: 7.5GB for the root mount, 7.2GB for home, and the rest for swap. The install took about 45 minutes.

The only sad thing is, my internet conection is poor and all the lovely software and packages i really want, have to be downloaded using apt-get before I am satisfied with the installation. And the system is based on Debian, which i am not really used to (that can change, though). I still long for FC3, or FC4 if i can get it. At least with those, i can compile drivers if i have to, and still have a lovely range of software - have you noticed that most third party linux software vendors always have a binary package for “xyz-i386-fc3-xyz” ?