My Story Researching Ubuntu
Written by Magnus Wahlberg
At my school they have something they call ”forsknings profil” it’s Swedish and translates to something like “Scientific/research profile”. That basically means that the students get to test what it’s like to do research at university level. Obviously the scales of the research projects are much smaller. Anyway if you apply for “forsknings profil” and get selected (like me), you get to borrow a laptop during the time you study and do your research.
So I received my laptop, a HP nx8220 I booted it up and not too surprisingly it had Windows XP preinstalled. So I did what I had to do, install Linux. Although it wasn’t exactly straight forward… I started out with a nice open hat, a fedora to be more precise. And let me tell you it wasn’t the most yummy experience I’ve had. The screen resolution refused to go higher then 1024*768, no wireless and it seemed virtually impossible to update the darn system. I took the hat and threw it out the window, literally five fedora cds flew out of my house in the order: cd 2, 4, 1, 3, and 5 (just random by the way). The next distro served to the laptop was a green German lizard, the Chameleon Suse. It too had serious problems with the graphics and as it seemed at the time problems with pretty much everything I tried. So I made a smoothie of the Suse DVD and went out looking for a distro that would just work.
And guess what I found it, a strangely named Linux flavor; Ubuntu. After downloading and burning the one cd (!). I slammed it into my laptop and fifteen minutes later it was done. About an hour later I was convinced that heaven is coffee colored. I mean seriously it just worked, everything was up and running out of the box (or rather out of the cdr…). The graphics, network, sound, updates I mean hell even the custom buttons at the top of the keyboard worked (in fact better than in Windows!). Unfortunately my adventures with Ubuntu managed to get me failed in the class that had first brought me the laptop to install it on. But that doesn’t really matter because I have a new friend, a brown friend that by the way now can turn itself into a cube, burn up and wobble around (thanks to my buddy Beryl). Ubuntu – Linux for human beings? Nah more like: Linux for people who like when their computers just work, and the color brown.
