Following the Penguin – Summer Edition

It’s that semi-annual time of year for me to dive headlong into the Ubuntu land of hippies, do-gooders, and folks who FLOSS regularly.   I was missing some of the interface options in Ubuntu with my latest couple of months on the Windows 7 Release candidate (by all accounts, the best Windows yet).  So it was time to format all the computers I could get my hands on (this time, including my fiancée’s brand new laptop, my netbook, and our living room media machine), and in the words of the Penguin from Fight Club: Slide.

Amongst other things, I was missing the lastest version of "Gnome-Do," which combines a Launchy type full-text search/launcher, with a dock. Rather than going the “stable” route, I decided to install Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala.    Every iteration of Ubuntu I’ve tried starting with 7.04 is at least 10% closer to perfect for most users.  This time, I’m bringing my fiancée along.  She’s a longtime mac user, and when the time came for a new laptop, she just couldn’t justify the premium she’d have to pay, but she just couldn’t bring herself to be “one of those boring brown-suit PC guys from the commercials.”  So I figured give her some Compiz and teach her some cool Exposé like window switching (alt/shift and up). 

In addition to the new laptop, my EEE Pc 1000h is getting the update to 9.10, as is our living room htpc. 

Every time I come back to Ubuntu from a trip to Windows, it reminds me of just how important it is to have a repository for apps.  The Synaptic Package Manager is just a killer part of the Linux desktop.  If I want to solve a problem, say try a different IM program, or play around with the perfect media setup to ease my fiancée’s iTunes withdrawal symptoms, the answer is usually only a search away. 

I’m pretty comfortable in the command line, but one of my goals for this install, and something that’s virtually critical for any chance of success with the fiancée is to not have to open a Terminal to perform basic functions.  I’m happy to say that so far the only time I’ve had to was in installing Songbird on the laptop.  Technically, I probably could’ve done without hitting the terminal, but I would have had to login as root to get at some folders. 

My initial transition was not without some speed bumps.  For one, I had to update the firmware on my router (D-Link DIR-655), to convince it that Linux computers should be allowed to do anything on a LAN beyond receive an internet connection.  It wasn’t my first guess, and not really Ubuntu’s fault, but it made me second guess my choice for a few minutes. 

It took me about half an hour to solve the problem, and once the firmware was upgraded, the LAN has been rock solid, and it’s painless to share folders and interface with my NAS between Linux machines as well as the remaining Windows boxes.  That said, I don’t think I’m the typical home user, who likely would’ve just said “forget it” and installed Windows.  I think there’s definitely a need for the community to work on better error messages, and possibly integrated troubleshooting, to at least help rule out what the problem isn’t.  For example, when I tried to connect from one computer to another, which I could see through Samba (nothing showed up as a Linux machine under networking), the error I got was “Unable to mount location: Failed to retrieve share list from server.” It’s just not very user-friendly, and while there is a vast community of users out there, reporting and troubleshooting errors, it would be nice to integrate some of those things into the desktop itself.  Walk the new user through a few common troubleshooting steps before showing them a picture of a sympathetic penguin suggesting they ask their local forum.

Still, that has been the only real hiccup so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing how long I can jive with my happy feet before I need to come back to big Red(mond).