Volition

After constantly telling everyone I know to install Ubuntu Linux for the last six months, I've finally put it on my own workstation. Ahh, hipocracy, you used to be a friend of mine. Wait, you still are. Good.

Anyway, I installed the latest preview of the next release (Hoary Hedgehog) and it seems to be working out well. As I kept my home partition and installed the same apps as I use to have, things are pretty much same old, same old. There are some nice new features in Gnome 2.10 however and Synaptic almost feels like a useful way to manage packages. What else? Epiphany seems to be built against Mozilla Firefox instead of the old suite, which may fix some annoyances like a lack of useful form auto-fill. Evolution 2.2 is incrementally less painful then 2.0, but I would still flee back to Thunderbird if only it used evolution-data-server for storing and retrieving address book entries.

Installation was a bit of a pain. Being an old fart, I like to have /, /usr, /var and /home on separate partitions. This helped because I could wipe the first three to do a fresh install while keeping my home directory intact. It also hindered because I have a 512Mb partition for /var and for some reason the installer tried to copy the entire CD worth of packages to /var, filling it completely. The work-around was to do an expert install, which involved answering twice as many questions (some of which were pretty arcane) and not choosing to copy all the packages over from the CD. They are installed automatically anyway after the first reboot.

Aside from some niggling problems getting the network configured, the rest has been smooth sailing. I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu. Let me know if you want a copy of the installer or live CDs, I now have a working burner and many blank discs.