I've installed multiple linux distributions over the course of the last decade or so. I was there, back in the day, installing slackware from floppy disks on a souped-up 486 with a stonking 64mb of RAM. I dallied with SUSE, I actually ran RedHat for almost 24 hours before the self-loathing grew too great. I tried Fedora, which got at least a couple of weeks of my life. I tried a couple of releases of Ubuntu, including a pre-release alpha when they were just nearing 1.0. The one constant has been Debian, which despite the truculent awkward oblique installer and the overbearing social conscience of the whole thing, is still the only distro I could live with for any period of time. I run it on servers, desktops, and everywhere I rejoice about the excellent package management and the fact that it almost works.
In trying to set up a spare machine, I failed twice to get a newly-burnt Ubuntu CD to install, due to errors in the CD. Looks like it's a problem with burning the image from a Mac, since it worked when I burnt the image on the target machine. Anyway, this led to a brief attempt to install Debian's latest and greatest. Within about 30 minutes it was clear that my three-year-old laptop's LCD monitor resolution was not recognised (1400x1050), and that significant tweaking of the config files would ensue.
So I tried once more to burn and install Ubuntu, and this time it succeeded. There was lots of whirring and chugging and one reboot. I was sat working on the powerbook when suddenly, with a drum roll, the laptop sprang into life, and there was the Ubuntu login screen, at the correct resolution. Logging in unveiled a fully workable desktop, with sound, networking, everything. This is what linux should be like. This, my friends, is the future.
Posted by savs at July 13, 2005 8:55 AM