Last night I had a spare hour or so and decided to load the Ubuntu Studio DVD on my laptop. No internet connection while loading and I made a mistake about what programs were loaded so this morning I did it again. Plug in the power supply, attach the DSL cable and hit F12 on startup, choose disc boot and slid in the DVD.
All went swimmingly, got all the programs installed and immediately got on the internet without having to know anything or fill out anything. During the loading I was asked for a proxy server but I just ignored that and carried on… so I guess I don’t get served by proxy.
Linux OS’s are constrained by law to be able to carry some proprietary codecs for video and sound but all it means is a little extra setup after the OS is loaded. I tried a DVD and it wouldn’t load so I went to the help menu and the links to the needed files are within the help file so they loaded easy and then a little typing into another program, while still having the help menu open… try doing that in Windows, and push enter and DVD’s played.
Initially it’s kinda weird how Linux works but it soon becomes obvious how easy and well thought out things are. I’m just new to laptops and the windows sliding bars, with the arrow buttons, at the side of windows to move the pages up and down are a pain in “Windows” with one at the top and one at the bottom. In Linux they are both at the bottom and that makes things so much easier. And when you do something wrong in Linux….nothing happens! You know how one can get into lots of trouble in “Windows” if one inadvertantely goes the worng way or pushes the wrong button, well it won’t happen with Linux, you can’t do things wrong and even if you do you just do the right thing and your back on track.
Theres this thing called mounting in Linux where a CD or DVD thats loaded won’t autorun, it needs to be mounted first, either in the my computer menu or by opening the program you want to run it. Then when you finish or quit it won’t eject, manually or within the software, until you unmount it then either eject it manually or in the software. Might seem a little complicated but it means alot as far as having choice about how you want to do things. Even with my limited experience I’m thinking I’m going to get the hang of Ubuntu real quick simply because it echoes my own practises. Consumer electronics aren’t the same as professionally specific electronics… the same seems to go with Windows and Linux… so I’m supposing that what the Apple geeks were on about for so long… is what Linux is doing for the PC, and possibly more so as they’ve been able to learn from both!
So next fire up I’ll do music CD’s, utube vids and mp3’s etc.
And what a gorgeous desktop. Well, not exactly gorgeous but alot more hopeful than anything under the commercial applications.
