As I wrote about on Friday, this was a busy work weekend for me. I think three of the computers I worked on offer an interesting comparison in operating systems.
One laptop was a brand new HP with 2 GB of RAM and Windows Vista, but the owner wanted me to install Windows XP and take off Windows Vista. He uses it primarily for traveling and downloading his digital photos while traveling and just didn’t like the lack of speed with Vista. The install of Windows XP went smoothly, but finding some of the XP drivers for it took quite a bit of looking around. All is running well now, and the with 2GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, the little laptop is very fast. Bootup time is under 70 seconds.
The next laptop was another Vista machine with 1 GB of RAM that a client bought for her mom who is a first time computer user and is 83 years old I believe. She will take the laptop with her to Connecticut next week. I took off all the pre-installed junk and installed AVG anti-virus and configured a Gmail account to work with Windows Mail (Vista’s version of Outlook Express). Because her mom has some sight problems, I bumped up the text size and DPI setting to make it easier to work with for her. Also, I disabled all of Vista’s fancy eye candy and effects. Despite all these tweaks, the computer still takes more than three minutes to fully boot up. And unless you experience it, I can’t adequately describe how slow Vista feels and operates.
On Friday, I described a third computer that I was working on for a customer who had a hard drive crash and HP’s recovery disks wouldn’t work. After talking with her about options, she decided to let me install Ubuntu Linux on the computer. I used the current 7.04 version and installed in under twenty-five minutes! This computer is probably four to five years old and has only 256mb of RAM, but still is MORE than powerful enough for Ubuntu. I setup her desktop to resemble Windows so she could make the transition a little easier. She is an AOL user so she will have to access that via AOL’s web interface, but that shouldn’t be a problem. It will be fun to see how she handles the transition to Ubuntu, and I will keep all of you informed of her progress.
The graphic I placed in this article is the final desktop configuration of her Ubuntu desktop, click on it to get a larger view.
By the way, the Ubuntu computer (the oldest of these three), boots up in under sixty seconds!
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I have installed Ubuntu in a number of my machines, I even installed Ubuntu 7.04 on a Mac G3…works great. I always use the alternate Text based installed as it will install on every machine that I try to install it on. It seems that Ubuntu will install 1/4 the time as a Windows installation…yes… a time saver!
Some machines one must go into the bios/setup menu to change the boot sequence so that one can boot from the disc.
The only minor issue that I have with Ubuntu is that you need to download some additional codecs to enable listening to streaming audio and even after that the Mplayer Totem is the one that works for streaming audio…Rhythum box doesn’t work for streaming…even after the G-Streamer codecs were downloaded. The ACPI issue will crop up on some older machines, but thats a minor issue too as one just needs to shut down the machine after you shut down Ubuntu.
If anyone is installing Ubuntu 7.04 on a IBM 300GL, take note of the start up sequence, change it accordingly and even though the 300GL comes with the soundcard built in…Ubuntu does not recognize it…just install a soundcard in the PCI slot and you should be good to go. I think the LSA and IRQ settings have something to do with this and likely need to be adjusted so that it can be recognized by Ubuntu. I haven’t had time to fool with the settings yet to see if that will solve the problem. The built in soundcard worked fine with Windows 98 but will not for Ubuntu, again a simple added PCI soundcard will easily solve that problem. Try to run at least 192 MB Ram, though 128 MB will work…but noticibly slower.
I tried the new Freespire 2.0, it seemed to install quicker than Ubuntu 7.04. The big difference with Freespire is that after you install it you can do streaming internet audio with no configuring, no additional installing, no additional downloading. I just clicked on the link on the the listen live and it played fine right the first time! Thats progress…also the desktop wallpaper can be changed to many different backgrounds thus making your desktop like a windows OS.