Up and Running

With the help of a buddy at work who is much more versed in the world of Linux than I am, I have gotten Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 to install on a separate partition and dual boot it with Vista Business.

My Dell XPS m1330 laptop shipped with Vista Biz edition on there and I wanted to keep it since there wasn’t much crapware preinstalled (thankfully). I uninstalled McAfffee Antivirus as that service has gone downhill as of late. I now use Antivir which nags every now and then, but at least is free and self-updates.

I went over to APC mag’s step by step walk through of this process and it went off without a hitch. Well, that’s not quite true. I was a dork and first tried to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and that didn’t seem to like the m1330 too much. I figured it’d be more stable, but that did not turn out to be the case. I couldn’t get X11 to start and ended up at the command line trying to fiddle with a configuration files for X11 (xorg.conf) to see if I could get it going. A fellow dual-booter at work told me that I’d have to move up to the Gutsy Gibbon tribe 5 version of Ubuntu and then it would work. Lo and behold he was right.

After the install, I was told to add a few lines to xorg.conf as found in this bug report. Adding those lines made the upper and lower menu bar hang out in their proper places instead of taking up what looked like 1024×768 territory.

As soon as I started up with the screen looking the way it should, I proceeded to run the update manager which seemed to find a bunch of things to update and proceeded to download and install them. I messed around with some of the settings to change font size since they were way too big and turned on more effects that I believe are powered by compiz. The effects while completely unnecessary add to my enjoyment of using Ubuntu immensely. I’m not sure what it is about having the nice effects and just the right setup, but it helps me enjoy my computing much more. For example, on Vista, I installed rocket dock, icon packager with their Local Flavor icon pack, along with a nice vintage looking desktop wallpaper from interfacelift. I also got rid of the Vista and Google Desktop sidebars in favor of Yahoo’s Konfabulator…er Widgets.

Anyway, Ubuntu has been a pretty nice system thus far and seems like it can be my primary OS except for the fact that I haven’t found drivers for my printer yet. This seems to be the achilles heel of Linux. Darned hardcopies!