RSS 2.0
My Ubuntu Story
I have been a long time Linux user, although not continuously. As early as 1992, I had a copy of Slackware, that allowed me to have the same UNIX experience as I had on Ohio State’s Sun Stations. Since then, I have worked with two other different versions…RedHat and then Debian. One server that I use is still running Debian. However, usually each time I tried, I would use it for a while, and then revert to windows for one reason or another.
Recently, I have been wishing for something better, and I read an article about how some prominent techies like Cory Doctorow have been switching to Ubuntu. So, the other day I decided to give it a try.
I burned the Edgy-Eft distribution to a CD a plugged it in. Lo and behold-BLACK SCREEN. I knew what had happened too-as soon as it switched to X windows, the monitor would not sync. Admittedly, my hardware was a little long in the tooth, but I had higher hopes.
So, I began my typical Linux experience of browsing for the fix to my problem. I found a very active group of people debugging a similar issue.
I began trying all of their suggestions. This involved many trials, failures, and reboots with no success. I even burned a copy of the non-released Feisty distribution, but with no success.
This morning, I ran across a very simple set of instructions, which reminded me that I rather than trying to patch the OS, I should just try to reconfigure what was there. I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and told it what kind of video card I had, and voila-<full on Ubuntu.
I am writing this post from Firefox on Ubuntu now. I like the font rendering and the ability to multitask better than Windows XP. I already connected to the shared printer and printed with no problem. It appears that Linux may have reached a critical state where it can give MacOS or Windows a run. I’ll let you know.
