The story behind Linosaur

In 1998 I worked in a place that used Sun workstations. When I joined I was given the oldest, slowest Sun with about the power of a 486. I pestered my boss until he gave me money to get a faster computer, and when I got it, I bought a cheap AMD K6 and installed Mandrake Linux on it. The new box ran 10 times faster and worked seamlessly with the existing Unix network and file servers. Linux was a bit quirky back then, but I actually managed to do more and better work with it than I could on Solaris. By the time I left in 2003, they were installing Red Hat on the other Sun workstations because it was cheaper than renewing the Sun maintenance contract...

Fast forward to 6 months ago. I hadn't used any kind of Linux in ages, and I wanted to try it again to see if it had improved. This time, my distro of choice was Ubuntu, because I heard that it was the best integrated and most user friendly Linux distribution ever.

I had just dismantled all my old computers and shuffled the bits around to make two new machines, so I picked the best for my Linux guinea pig. It was an old Compaq that ended up with a 733MHz P3, 256MB of memory, dual 80GB hard disks, and a Delta 66 soundcard. A bit slow, but if Ubuntu could still run fast on it, extra points for not being bloated!

Installing Ubuntu turned out to be very easy. I downloaded an ISO from the Ubuntu site on my other computer (hey, the more boxes the better right?) and used ImgBurn to burn it to a CD. The guinea pig booted from this CD on the first attempt. A very handy feature of the Ubuntu install CD is that it also functions as a liveCD, so you can try Ubuntu and make sure it works with your hardware before committing to install it to your hard drive.

Anyway, that's exactly what I did. The partitioning program easily shuffled the existing Windows 98 installation to one side and converted the machine to a dual boot. Well, "easily" as in "Crashed halfway through but worked anyway..."

During the installation, it asked for a hostname. It was Linux, and the machine was a bit of a dinosaur, and Soundgarden once did a song called Rhinosaur. I also have a laptop called linoceros, but that's another story.

OK, Linux, what now?

I was very impressed with Ubuntu. The desktop (provided by Gnome) looks great, and they managed to keep all the benefits of browser integration while avoiding the horrors. You can drag and drop stuff seamlessly between local disks, SMB shares on Windows machines (if you do the proper voodoo rites to tell Nautilus your SMB username and password!) and FTP sites. I even got the Flash player to work.

But I wasn't so impressed with the GUI applications that I tried. I was struggling to see what Linux could actually do for me, now that I was just messing with it at home instead of talking to Sun workstations. It wasn't an office suite: OpenOffice was painfully slow, taking minutes to open a document, though MS Office ran very quickly under Windows 98 on the same machine. It probably wasn't a tool for sound or picture editing either. The GIMP was a lot slower than Photoshop LE had been on the Win98 side of the same machine.

But I was soon to discover that moaning about the GUI was missing the whole point of Linux... tbc

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