After almost 10 years as a Redhat junkie, I finally made the move to debian… well, kind of. I’ve had a GNU-based, philosophical interest in debian for many many years, but never adopted the distro after numerous failed installs based on unsupported bleeding edge hardware — we all want the latest gear, right?

Enter Ubuntu…. I installed Ubuntu 6.10 exclusively on one of my spare boxes (Intel P4/1Ghz/1Gb). I also formatted my work laptop (Intel PM/2Ghz/1Gb) and dual-booted it with Ubuntu 6.10 and Windows XP. To my surprise but not shock, the install was trivial and all hardware on both machines was fully recognized and supported — even the wireless network adapter on the laptop! So far the only things that tripped me up were:

• location and management of init.d scripts (many distros use runlevels differently)
• user config scripts for customizing the X sessions (managed by gdm)
• out-of-the-box requirement to use sudo for -everything-

Of course the first thing I replaced was Gnome/Metacity in favor of the best window manager of-all-time WMII — who needs a mouse! I’m sure I’ll be ranting and raving about this distro for a few weeks/months to come…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 11:38 pm and is filed under .plan.