Ubuntu testimonial

So I was given an older Toshiba Satellite Pro notebook. 40 gig hard drive, single core processor....not impressive but definitely usable. I figured I'd install ubuntu or some other linux distro on it and use it for web development or something with Ruby on Rails/MySQL etc. As I was installing the OS, I'm also looking up drivers, in particular a wireless driver b/c I have never installed any OS onto a machine without having to install several drivers, especially the wireless card. Ubuntu finished its install and I was armed with a jump drive carrying a windows version of the WLAN driver (which I intended to install using ndiswrapper) but the machine was already detecting my network! I about shat myself, then decided to rave about it on the forums. So there you have it, my testimonial about Ubuntu's powerful hardware recognition.

Lol, Amateur. Wait until you have something that's tricky to install even with the Windows driver CD it came with and go to install SUSE expecting a battle with the Kernel to get it loaded and see that before the thing is even finished it's popped up saying it found new hardware and it's ready to go and it actually works.

I have a USB DVD / CD burner combo drive here that in Windows barely works at all. I can't even get it to properly burn anything. Now, on my laptop, I had a CD for the DVD drive so it could play DVDs and stuff.

The CD cracked. Can't install now. So I grabbed a Slackware install disk, installed, and now I can watch DVDs anyway. I don't need a disk.

And that drive that burns and doesn't work in Windows? Instead of spending an hour looking for a good CD burner program or DVD burning application, I just hooked it up, turned it on, and when I checked it had mounted itself and, well, if you've ever burned an ISO in Windows it's not as easy....But on SUSE Linux, with KDE, I double clicked the ISO, it popped up K3B, checked the MD5 Sum for me, and then I clicked on "Start" and it went.

In Windows the same task starts with making sure the drive works, which it doesn't, even though it isn't even listed as supported in Linux, it DOES. Then when you want to burn an ISO, you have to find some software to do that, and then in Nero I know there is another step to make it burn the image file right, and in Linux, I double click and click on start lol.

Don't get me started on my Sound Card in my server. In Windows it takes TWO reboots and a CD to work. In Linux it takes.... Well it detects it on boot and works out of the box...

By The way if anyone is wondering why it takes TWO reboots for a Sound Card, well, when you install Windows and boot up for the first time, it finds all that hardware and tries to make it work asking for disks and stuff, and then you need to reboot for the first portion of the hardware before it even gets to the soundcard, where once you have that done, you install the driver from a CD, then reboot AGAIN, and it finally works.

By the way, if you're shocked this worked on hardware, wait until you see there aren't any service packs and that the ONLY rebooting you need to do are for Kernel updates.

Heh I still remember the first time I got online with Linux, I was like crap I have to download all these updates and....Do I reboot? I was so used to Windows I was rebooting in between until someone started laughing at me on a mailing list.

I also stopped down loading updates after the first one. Why? Because a little icon popped up and said updates were ready and asked if I wanted to look at them first..... This was before XP had that ability so I didn't understand it to well but it worked.

Geez... Gore... sounds like you have encountered some super crappy hardware.. Man Requiring a CD to use a DVD-ROM or a SoundCard.. man that must have sucked like a hoover on heat.. Never have figured why sound is required on a server.. but then everyone's use is different...
ahhh. did PC's have dvd/CD Burners back when you last used Winbloze?

@keezel: It is great when you do an install and EVERYTHING just works.. some of my recent installs there was not even a need to do any tweaking..
One of the great things with the current crop of popular *nix distro's .. now seeing average people using them.. and asking for help ;)

I had an old PIII lappy here that was looking for something to do.. so set it up as a home security system.. DSL (Damn Small Linux) was loaded to the HDD.. no driver issues at all.. webcams .. sound...

so really .. If you had a bad experience with *nix n the past (ie windows brain rot like I had suffered) give the current crop a run.. you will be surprised and pleased

Well it's not really a server. It used to be my main desktop, but the video card on it is crapped out so it only displays text properly, and a GUI looks like crap on it. So I decided to throw another HD in it, and use it as my FTP server instead of the other machine I WAS using for that purpose. Works fine with text only with Slackware, but X and Windows don't looks very good on it but it's still fine for a server where most of the time I'm setting up FTP or an HTTP server which you really only need VI and no GUI for anyway, so I did that so I could still use it.

And I have a Laptop and two other machines that have a little partition for XP for school and stuff like that, so I still use Windows on a few things, just not much. Everything gets backed up to my FTP server when I get something changed so I have a back up, so if for some reason Windows stops loading I can literally just format the machine's Windows partition, reinstall, and then use FTP to grab all my stuff. Much easier heh.

;) Yep ;)

If you think Ubuntu has good hardware detection, you should try Linux Mint.
It detected my restricted Broadcom wireless right after installation and installed the driver and loaded it for me--no other distro has ever done that
Mint I believe is based off of debian and uses the ubuntu repositories...or maybe they say its based off of debian bc it's based off ubuntu--i'll have to check that :p

Anyways, linux mint is basically an improved ubuntu that includes OUT OF BOX every codec you will need, DVD playback, flash, java...

Oh yeah, and it looks better than Ubuntu :eek:

I swear, I come across better distributions every month :D (i don't see anything topping mint at the moment though)

edit: www.linuxmint.com

I've had a copy for a few months now. It reminded me of the Shamrock shakes at Mcdonalds so I installed it.

Years ago when I hooked up with Verizon aDSL they told me that Linux was unsupported probably wouldn't work, They asked me if I wanted a MAC or a Windows cd with my service.

I installed the equipment, had a few minutes worth of necessary configuration in Windows XP. Life was good.

Rebooted my box and told it to come up in Linux. For shits and giggles I launched the browser and found myself on the net with absolutely no manual configuration whatsoever.

Another time I swapped a MOBO and processor, thinking I could get away without reloading everything. Windows XP had to be reloaded, SuSe though slower on the first boot came up without any intervention.

So much for the FUD on Linux

I remember trying to get wifi working on RedHat a few years ago. It was a pain, to say the least. I switched back to wired for my desktop for quite a while.

I have since switched to Ubuntu, and found that much like keezel, getting my wireless working was a snap. I just had to put the encryption key in, and was on in no time.

Ubuntu really qualifies as the "It just works" OS.

You don't have to reboot seven times in the process of
installation, and then start the process of installing
each peripheral and its proprietary driver. There are still
some unsupported wireless cards that need ndiswrapper
though.