As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a slew of reasons to leave my MS Windows-controlled hard disk drive behind and cross-over into the Ubuntu Linux cloud.
Things are, well... Awesome. I actually enjoy sitting in front of the laptop again now that I don't have to stare at the system tray wondering how many files are being fragged, how soon before I will need more virtual memory, when the next virus or Trojan attack will happen or why the heck the MS File Indexing tool is taking up so much system memory while I'm not running any foreground applications or changing any files.
Crossing over wasn't easy. Not that it was the fault of Ubuntu. Microsoft knew I was sprinting off on my Logan's Run and did its best to prevent it. The largest problem was getting an iso copy of the Ubuntu OS. I knew that Ubuntu had recently released the beta of 9.10 Karmic Koala so I figured I would give it a spin.
I used one of the Lenovo ThinkCentre systems at work sporting an Intel Core 2 VPro chip running MS Vista and an RW-DVD drive to create the bootable Karmic CD. I located the iso image file at Argonne National Laboratory Public Software Mirror and downloaded the 700 MB file in under a minute. Things were going well. I planned to simultaneously install Ubuntu on a Toshiba Tecra laptop running a 1.66 GHz T1300 Centrino chip with 1 GB of RAM and a jalopy desktop I kludged together at work that is based on an old 2.4-GHz Pentium 4HT with 512M of RAM.
The jalopy doesn't support booting from the USB so I needed to burn a bootable CD containing the iso image. After my elation of the quick iso download, I was brought down to earth quickly. The Vista system presented options for creating an audio CD or a File Manager formatted data disk, but no iso burner. So I downloaded a copy of Alex Fienman's ISO v2 burner and installed. I send my continual thanks to our IT department for promoting my network account to Admin or I would have been dead in the water.
The next portion of the saga is something I could have avoided with 20/20 hindsight, but suffice it to say my cardiologist will have some more damage to repair on my next visit. Long story, short, the Vista system only created an error-free iso burn on the fourth try. I didn't expect this shinny new Core 2 VPro Vista system to have any problems burning a CD-R. It looks like the classic "This system is about to create files on the writable CD. Please do not run any programs during this operation. Even mouse interrupts can cause errors in your copy." disclaimer of the early-1990's is still in effect in 2009. Ugh.
After I obtained an error free disk, the sun started to shine and the heavens began to sing. Inserting the CD into both systems, answering five configuration questions, including boot sector options, and they were on their way. Both systems took around 20 min to be reborn as a 9.10 Karmic Koala Ubuntu system running from a freshly formated ext4 hard disk drive.
Karmic includes Mozilla Firefox 3.5.3 for Ubuntu and on the laptop it takes 30 seconds from cold boot to login screen and 20 seconds to launched browser after password. Wow... I'm impressed. Neither system required me to troll virus-laden device driver websites to get everything working. It just "works".
Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" will be in official release at the end of October. If this late-stage beta is any measurement, it will be awesome.
