The Computer Saga, Linux Edition

I've mentioned a few times the ongoing battles with computers around the Crabitat. Between driver problems, software issues and "fun" programs installed by the kids, it's been kind of unpleasant. Add to those the general intrusiveness of Microsoft Windows XP and their Genuine (Dis)advantage "updates" and the need to call the nice folks in India when you want to make a few hardware changes to a computer and it becomes a real nightmare. So I've really been interested in looking into Linux.

I happen to have a really elderly (by today's standards) Dell Optiplex GX1 with a dinky little Pentium II processor running at 333MHz. I installed the maximum amount of memory (3×128M) a while back. But it isn't exactly what you'd call lightning fast by any means. But I thought I'd just see whether Ubuntu would work on it. Heck - if Dell is looking at Linux for users, why shouldn't I? So I booted up off the live disk.

And everything - Every. Single. Thing. - on that computer was recognized by the software and set up to run flawlessly. Not one single glitch. (Well, except the ones I caused. I had disabled the on-board network interface a while back and had to change that in the setup and enable the on-board sound again.) Once that was up and running, the whole shebang worked perfectly. So I wiped the drive (through the Ubuntu setup) and installed it.

The darn thing runs perfectly. Not a single flaw that I have found yet. It reads my Palm Pilot even. USB zip drives, ditto. When I left it this morning, it was busily installing the 137 updates it found for itself (it asked me before it did so, of course). There were a lot of updates because I was using an older distro disk, by the way. Later on, I'll fire that puppy up and try blogging from it.