The Acer 6930-6455 laptop is a marvelous portable computer. It features a Core2 Duo with 4GB RAM, a 250GB AHCI SATA hard drive, bright sixteen inch widescreen monitor, stereo microphones and speakers, SDHC memory card reader, ExpressCard54 slot, HDMI and standard DB-15 VGA port, wireless and Gigabit Ethernet, dialup modem connection, Dolby sound, and lots more that I'm forgetting right now. Suffice it to say that getting all this in a relatively mobile form factor for under six hundred dollars represents some of the best bang-for-the-buck action you can get. All this hardware goodness shipped with a slathering of 64-bit Vista (home Premium) SP1 and a plethora of helper apps courtesy of the fine folks at Acer.
Of course, the first thing I did was save the factory setup and make the recovery disk set of (2? 3?) DVDs so I could put Humpty Dumpty back together again if my experiments were unsuccessful. This backup operation was no small feat in itself, taking the better part of several hours. (Did you know the first time you turn on a new Vista PC it takes almost three quarters of an HOUR before you can actually USE it?) But eventually I got there and was able to start the process of installing SOMETHING NEW.
First up was 32-bit XP Professional. Acer ships this unit with Vista, and supports drivers for Vista. ONLY. They offered NO help whatsoever in getting the "backrev" operation to work. Fortunately there is Google, the all-knowing, all-seeing oracle (wait - that's another company) whose vast database of accounts by prior trekkers was to help me get to the promised land of XP goodness. I wrote about it here and won't repeat myself, but the bottom line is that XP worked better and was WAY more familiar than Vista. (Who made the incredibly outrageous decision to change EVERYTHING around in the Vista UI? Very Bad Decision, Redmond.)
Next up was 64-bit XP which presented a whole new universe of challenge finding the proper drivers for this baby. Yeah, I found them all eventually, no thanks again to the manufacturer, but who knew the sheer number of applications that are NOT ready for 64-bit primetime? Antivirus, firewall, and network security were my first challenges, and thankfully the same Google also came to my rescue and helped steer me to some brand new proggies I had never heard of before, all of which worked as well or better than the ones I'd been using for YEARS. Hey, this is turning out to be a wonderful learning experience, huh?
Then late in April, I downloaded the X64 version of the Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate, burned the ISO image to CD, and live-booted the laptop to see what it would do. As I have chronicled here already, this was an eye opener of the first degree, wherein everything just seemed to work from the get-go. Video drivers, sound, wireless networking, keyboard controls (brightness, volume, etc.) - all working just the way they were supposed to. Holy moley, Batman. This is TOO EASY. So I decided to make a leap of faith and install the release version directly to the hard drive.
Ubuntu 9.04 on the hard drive booted very quickly, shut down equally fast, and in general worked very snappily in everything I threw at it.
While I started off using the 64-bit version, compatibility issues (with Skype in particular) forced me to revert to the 32-bit release, but I hardly feel slighted or inconvenienced.
Ubuntu, and Linux distributions in general, are obviously different animals than the Windows your Dad used. Yeah, we've still got a graphic user interface (GUI), a point and click desktop, icons and folders, web browsers and media players, and drop down menus and more, just like Windows, but beyond the surface lies a different architecture, and very different foundation and organization, that takes some real getting used to. For the more senior users out there, you know that learning new stuff is not as easy as it once was, and so it is with Ubuntu. The thing that should make it easier for all of us is the aforementioned Google, and it's wonderful cacophony of users, both young and old, who've already been down this path and are seeing many of the same challenges and having almost the exact same questions.
HOW THE HECK do I do (whatever-it-is)?
Because I am a senior user, I have a set of things I want/need my computer to do for me. Because I do bare metal clean installs relatively frequently, I find that coming back to a known base configuration provides me a high degree of readiness, an ability to hit the ground running, as it were. I take advantage of this process to try out new programs and configurations, and have progressed to a point where I am very comfortable with a particular set of base apps that I use to get me started. The list isn't all that big: create and edit office documents like Word and Excel files, print to a shared network printer, surf the web, download stuff and be safe and secure doing it, play videos and MP3s, create, print, and open PDF files, record podcast segments, edit and view plain text files, video- and audio conference using Skype, remotely access other computers using VPN and VNC technologies, upload files to a web server, create and open compressed files, edit and create image files like JPEGs and GIFs, and work with the other kind of image files - ISO - to burn them to optical media.
I know I'm leaving stuff out, but for the sake of this discussion, let's go from here.
In the Windows Universe, we install applications from downloaded files or installation media like CDs and DVDs. In the Linux Universe, that holds true as well, but there we have a glorious construct known as Repositories which are online collections of drivers, updates, applications, system libraries, OS updates and upgrades, and much more. The nice thing about these repositories is that they are open, freely available, compatible to an industry standard for the most part and as varied and immense as you can imagine. By contrast the Windows Universe has nothing like it. Well, there's Windows Update, and Microsoft Update, but not much else.
These repositories are accessed via a network/Internet connection by a small utility called a Package Manager (PM). In Ubuntu I am using a PM called Synaptic, and here's how simple this thing really is. You can define the URLs of the online sources (repositories, or REPOS for short) from which you'd like to select, then Synaptic shows you a very large list of everything available, with a small search textbox plainly visible for you to type something in. My initial experience with Synaptic went like this: check a few additional boxes in the list of predefined repos, reload the listings and then type VLC for the VideoLan Client I wanted to install. VLC is a great app that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux and plays about any media file you can throw at it, DVDs included.
When I searched for VLC I was presented with a list of choices from which I clicked on the one I wanted (it wasn't THAT hard figuring out which one), told it to mark it for installation, then answered affirmatively when I was asked "Synaptic needs to install these other (support) files. Is that OK?" Inside of two minutes, I was downloading the files Ubuntu needed to get me up and running with VLC, and a couple minutes after that I was pulling down the Applications menu, selecting VLC and opening a DivX video file I'd downloaded earlier from the web. BINGO, playing like a charm, great picture quality, smooth video, and clear sound, just the way I would expect if I were doing the same thing on Windows.
Before I forget to mention, Ubuntu ships with several of the apps I used in that base list of stuff I wanted to do, like open and edit office documents with Open Office, surf the web with Firefox, burn DVDs with Brasero, remotely connect to computers using VNC (virtual network computing), record audio files and play MP3s, and much more. Synaptic was used to install stuff not already present on the system, like VirtualBox that lets me install XP and run it in a window on the Ubuntu desktop. Yeah, you read that right - Ubuntu can run XP, the whole thing, in a window or full screen, depending on how you need to use it. Hey, what does this tell you about "backward" compatibility?
This blog chapter is still being written, in that there are some programs, like Hamachi (VPN) that I use in Windows and would really like to use in Linux, but haven't had the time to follow what looks to be a more complex set of instructions to make it go. My philosophy about this Ubuntu Trek is this: do what is easiest first, and work on the harder stuff after that. In this way I can feel some small amount of accomplishment as I get to new plateaus of achievement and functionality, doing more things in Ubuntu the same or similar ways I did them in the Windows world.
So this time I told you about the package manager Synaptic and how it offers a monstrous online assortment of all kinds of stuff you can use, and how easily I was able to use it. As I get to new levels in Linux, I will update you here, but please feel free to provide me feedback in whatever form works best for you, including tips and techniques I might use to better utilize this wonderful free operating system we know as Ubuntu Linux.
As always, thanks very much for reading, and I'll see you next time.
P.S. - The new Star Trek movie is GREAT, so go see it and have two hours of fun in the dark.
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