Last night I backed up one of my drives and this morning I installed Ubuntu. It’s safe to say I leveled up this morning in coolness rating by concurrently installing Linux and reading the sci-fi classic Fall of Hyperion. I read a few guides and watched a few Youtube videos showing how to dual-boot XP & Ubuntu. It was sort of unnecessary since they all pretty much just say don’t overwrite your Windows drive when formatting. Then they all end by saying it’s so great because “it just works.”
But it didn’t work. The live-CD locked up on me the first time. Then I got it installed, but wireless didn’t work. So I busted out some cable and the wired connection didn’t work. Then I decided to reinstall but I messed up the drive formatting. Finally, I sorted that out and the wried connection still didn’t work, but it’s because I didn’t have the router plugged in. So, yah, pretty much my fault. It worked.
It recognized pretty much all my hardware, which was pretty fascinating. I haven’t had too much time to play with it, just enough to get functional dual monitors and a rotated screen. I’m impressed. The best part is that I feel like I got a new computer. Not everyone will feel this way, but I’ve had a “C: is almost full” message for the past month that I was getting tired of. I did a pretty sloppy install, so I’ll probably play around with it and do clean installs of Windows and Ubuntu in a few weeks. Installing it would be like a 5/5 on simplicity and this post gets a 0/5 on interestingness.
[I’m planning on writing a recap of the San Diego trip, but I’m at work and I wrote an outline down that is at home.]