There were reservations, I admit to being an XP convert, after a harrowing experience being dumped by the Apple community I helped create in the late eighties South Africa, many of whom went headlong and bling into the corporate sphere, sporting nasty condescending white ibooks, with cold callous black paraphenalia, and the latest titanium isn’t any better.

Apple jealously guard the bios of the OS forcing consumers to purchase hardware. Windows on the other hand simply refuse to get out of the way. A new look like the Ubuntu package I installed on my PC last night is just what the doctor ordered. But there were reservations. For instance, would I wipe out my illegal package of XP service pack 2, in the process losing all my files and shareware that has made XP the home of choice for many computer enthusiasts? Or would I be able to coexist?

For starters, I tried installing ubuntu into windows. The CD disk that comes free, that’s right, free, if you ask nicely, gave me an option to install into windows and demo the environment. No luck, after an interesting start-up, my screen was out of phase, with very little to see except fuzz. I then tried booting off the CD and changing the video mode, which worked.

Wow. My PC suddenly had the look of a high-end Apple Mac in Java colours. That’t the kind of thing which could get one killed in the nineties, but it would seem the look and feel wars are over. Now what we have are competing identities, for who gets to possess the freeist desktop.

Ubuntu worked on my simple Celeron 1.8ghz with Biostar board. So I did the inevitable – a full install. The package partitioned my hardrive nicely, let me keep my pirated version of XP and showed just how brillient the Debian Linux environment really is. Its lean, mean and has all the kinds of features that once made Apple attractive. Yes, everything is scriptable, but that’s not the neat part. What’s neat is that pretty much any combination of free programmes can get your computer up and running, and not one of them, that’s right, not one has anything to do with Microsoft.

Who needs Microsoft or Apple for that matter, in a world in which java-like applications stream off the net. The linux kernal is alive and free, and hopefully it will remain that way, as the third world plays catch-up using the spirit of ubuntu. I am because you are.

http://ubuntu.com

If Ubuntu is too robust for your liking. Try Xubuntu. Xubuntu is a lighter version of Ubuntu for slower i86 machines, and unlike ubuntu has to be downloaded, since there is no support for a free CD.

Tag: xubuntu