axeorcat

Ubuntu 5.1 installed supremely nicely on my Tecra. Yes I mean nicely: the function keys even work to change the screen brightness etc (without needing to install toshutils fnfxd). Graphics and soundcard all setup fine without me specifying anything at all. Wireless LAN was easily setup. It even detected my NTFS partition and automatically mounted it with a nice icon on my desktop! Not only that, I plug in a USB NTFS 40GB external hard drive…and it gets automatically mounted! I play my videos off it no problems using mplayer.

Firefox 1.5 installed no probs. Firefox even installed the latest flash plugin automatically when I hit a flash page. Cool. Got xmms listening to Soma radio no probs. Just ripped a DVD fine in one simple mencoder command line (quality was quite crap but that was probably me not putting any effort into the command line for a fast single pass rip). I never used Evolution before but got it up and running in no time. Seems like a nice product so far, just as good as Thunderbird. Will see how I get on with it.

I usually concentrate on the server side of linux and just dual boot XP/Fedora or XP/Debian at home for more multimedia home stuff as getting a fully set linux home PC was always just slightly too much hassle that I couldnt be bothered with late at night after a hard day of server hacking and coding when all I wanted to do was mount an external drive, rip a DVD in the background and watch some streaming TV shows I downloaded earlier.

I’ve never said this before with much confidence, but now I really think I wont need M$ for anything (maybe apart from some work stuff I use like Photoshop and Dreamweaver). Awesome stuff. If you’ve been put off by bad experiences with clunky Linux desktops of previous years, I urge you to give it a whirl again.