Ubuntu 6.06

I’ve been wanting for ages to give Ubuntu a try. Since Dapper Drake came out, and it hit the tech headlines, I’ve been curious to see what the open source community has to offer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my Powerbook to experimentation so I waited. And finally today I thought “hey, my girlfriend’s old laptop hard drive will do. I’ll go for it”. So I took one last look at the contents of the drive, and said good bye for ever. It took about 30 mins to install everything, entering a few details, username, password, etc. Then I updated which took a while. In the mean time I went looking for how to install a 3Com OfficeConnect 11g PC card which I was using. I plugged it in and nothing. Not a flicker. It wasn’t until I rebooted after the update when I suddenly flicked into life. I was seconds away from firing up the Terminal and installing ndiswrapper and doing stuff when I saw this.

So I checked the network settings and saw my wireless card there. “Great!” I thought. The prospect of using a wire on a laptop with a dodgy LAN port wasn’t good but its working now.

I’m just waiting for the upgrade to Edgy Eft to download and install although its getting late so I might have to leave it overnight. Or maybe 24 minutes if the current speed holds out (132kbps on a 8Mb line. Not great but not bad)

Its not ideal having XP Pro on one hard drive and Ubuntu on another but I wasn’t up to doing a dual boot now. Plus the laptop is old. If anyone out there has a spare laptop, not doing much, that they wish to donate, please let me know. I’d love to give it a good home.