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Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Started using Ubuntu Linux

I installed Ubuntu Linux 6.06 on a old eMachines laptop that Windows XP ceased working on. I had SuSE Linux 10.1 on the laptop initially, but it seemed very slow. So I went with Ubuntu and I've been very pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease of use of this distro. Getting used to sudo very quickly (Fedora Core and SuSE don't sem to make use of sudo much if at all). I have my Java development environment up and running (Java 1.5.0 Update 8, IntelliJ IDEA 5.1.2, DbVisualizer). I added MySQL 5.0.22 to the mix through the use of apt-get. I much prefer apt-get over finding RPMs and installing them through an RPM tool. Overall I'm becoming a big fan of Ubuntu Linux. BTW, I did have to pick up a different wireless networking card, as the built-in Broadcom networking in the laptop failed to connect to my wireless access points. I bought a Netgear WG511T network card, plugged it into the PCMCIA slot of the laptop and was up and running with WEP-encrypted wireless networking in about 30 minutes. It took me a bit to figure out the correct settings for the WEP encryption, but Ubuntu correctly found the new hardware and configured it on the fly. Very impressive.

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