Adventures in Ubuntuland.

Jan 23

Adventures in Ubuntuland.

Well , it took some time , but finally I have gotten down and dirty and soaked my feet in the ground of the motherland : Ubuntu 5.10 has been installed and is running smoothly on my old G3 mac. A few test installs I preformed earlier worked like a charm but I was stuck with a non-apple keyboard and I thought that was pretty annoying. So I plunked in my Mac keyboard , a two button mouse and was ready to go. Installing Ubuntu did NOT go without a hitch.. but that was the fault of little old me . Some scratches on the installation cd made the installation crash. Instead of just going dumbo-down on the problem and checking for some phisical damadge on the installation source .. I ripped out the hard drive .. tried 5 times to get it working and only THEN decided to go forth and burn another copy.

And what do you know : It worked like a charm. Internet connection was instant and installing new software went down without a hitch. I LOVE seeing the packets drip in when clicking on the 'terminal' button so you can really see what’s going down under the hood. What i loved the most was not only a few silly games that I selected .. but also the Ubuntu flavour of Emule and a bittorrent client. Oh how I love this machine already.

When I wanted to go further and install the Automatix script things went not so good. Again .. not ubuntu's fault. Of all the days the wanted to take down the ubuntu help forums it was at that exact time !! Aarg .. No help available. Oh well.. I wanted to toggle the next problem in line : Getting my keyboard layout to play nice . Although I had entered AZERTY (Belgian) as my keyboard layout, Ubuntu would not switch away from QWERTY (English) layout. I googled it up .. found that another user had the exact same problem and.. found that the answer was on the .. UBUNTU HELP FORUMS (aaarg – Again !). No matter .. i'll just leave it untill tomorrow.

Time for some desktop enhancement. I ditched the classic Ubuntu colour scheme and went for something blue. As a wallpaper I just hit Google for 'Ubuntu Wallpaper' and boy oh boy .. nice stuff is out there.
http://images.google.be/images?hl=nl&q=ubuntu%20wallpaper&sa=N&tab=wi
Some of my favourites : The Ubuntu Cypher and the Lanzado Ubuntu (currently my desktop).

More time wasting by choosing the right screensaver (Matrix code of course) and browsing the Emule network for some cool stuff.

So tonight i'll tackle some more problems and see if I get the automatix script running on my blue and white baby. I've also found THIS great link to set as you Ubuntu HOMEPAGE (cause this is THE reference for us newbie’s : http://easylinux.info/wiki/Ubuntu#Unofficial_Ubuntu_5.10_Starter_Guide ) What a guy .. what a manual .. 🙂

So .. so far i've enjoyed every minute of my Ubuntu installation. I'm challenged to look for solutions and am amazed at the simplicity of installing stuff and getting stuff done. Even the command line tutorials I have found can be done by a newbie like me by just using COPY from the website and PASTE in the command line. (and it works by golly !) And the speed is quite amazing. The Old G3 350 that was cast to the side because it could only run OS9 smoothly .. now has a new lease on life. Its not flaming fast but its comfortably usable . Firefox takes about 5 seconds to boot from scratch .. but hey.. I'll just leave it open in the background. So this week I’ll tackle some of the 'beginners items' and let you know how it goes.

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