My laptop died during my trip to the ACWA conference in San Diego in early December. It wouldn’t boot up, and the hard drive icon didn’t light up, suggesting that the hard drive was dead. So the day before yesterday, while I was in Best Buy to get my son a graphics card for our main computer (which didn’t end up working), I bought an inexpensive replacement hard drive in the hopes that I could make my laptop work again.
I managed to get the old hard drive out and the new one in without destroying anything, but was then faced with a computer without an operating system. I tried to figure out how to download a replacement version of Windows XP, which had come with the laptop, but wasn’t able to very quickly. Then I had an idea: For a long time, I’d been wanting to load one of the various Linux operating systems on the notebook. Since I now had a notebook with a completely empty hard drive, I decided this was the time.
I had previously downloaded several Linux distributions and tried them out on a “live CD” basis (where the OS boots off of a CD). Those included Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, OpenSuse, and one other whose goofy cute name escapes me. I managed to locate the OpenSuse CD and loaded it on, but had a problem with the wireless access (which, as will be seen, seems to be common). So I downloaded a new ISO file of Ubuntu, burned it onto a CD, and installed Ubuntu on the laptop.
Unfortunately, that wireless connection problem persisted under the Ubuntu installation. Figuring out what the problem was wasn’t easy; it required finding the model of my wireless card, then browsing various web pages and posts before finally (after a period of almost two hours) finding one that had the solution, which involved downloading a new driver for the wireless card. I was pretty pleased with myself for figuring it out.
Now I could surf the internet. But soon I discovered another problem … no sound! This took me another couple of hours to figure out (again, IDing the sound card, looking on line for similar complaints, etc.). In the end, I figured out the sound problem on my own (the software that controlled the sound card had for some reason made the assumption that there would be an external amplification of the sound; unchecking a box fixed the problem).
So I’m running my newly-fixed computer on Ubuntu Linux. I am an Ubuntu nerd! But my experiences convince me that these free OSs still have a long way to go if they are to be more broadly accepted. I was able to get my machine working because I have the aptitude for working on computers, I had some extra time because I was off this week, and I enjoy the challenge. But Joe Schmoe isn’t going to want to mess with wireless cards and sound cards, he just wants his computer to run. For all its faults, I never spent 4 hours plus trying to get basic functions to work on Windows XP.
The good news is that I love the system now that it’s working. It boots up in a flash (unlike Windows XP), it runs one of my favorite open source programs (the image editor GIMP) much better than XP (probably because GIMP was designed to run on Linux), it is much more configurable and fun to mess around with. The OS doesn’t treat you like an idiot, as Windows often does.
My first output on the new system was this wild picture of Elsie, created on GIMP just for fun:
Technology is a wonderful thing, no?
Categories: technology
Tags: Ubuntu Linux