I got around to installing Ubuntu this afternoon. I’d been hoping to try it out for a while and my weeks off college seemed to give me enough time to fix anything that went wrong. Yes, I gave myself two weeks to install an OS. I’m now taking bets on whether I’ll need it.
Cock-up the first: I made sure all of my data (years of emails, gigabytes of juggling videos, other miscellany) onto the data partition I created when I got the new hard disk a few months back. During installation I wiped every partition on hard disk one besides the Windows one, leaving the data all safe on hard disk two. Except for some reason that is completely beyond my comprehension I was completely wrong about what disk contained what data. I’ve had a 120 gigabyte disk with no data on it for the last few months; the data partition was at the end of the first disk. Fiddledee-dee.
Cock-up the second: Actually this one isn’t so much a cock-up as an annoyance. Much like having a pencil jabbed in your eye is annoying. I have a Linksys wireless network card, with a Broadcom chipset. The only thing you need to know about this is that Broadcom hates Linux in general and everyone who uses it in particular. So I have to use some very cryptic and obscure methods to get it to work; I won’t detail them here. What I will detail is how frustrated I feel right now. Details of how frustrated I feel: Uuuuaaaaarrrggghhh! Uuunnnngggghhh!!?!
To be fair, shitty network cards and Dell’s even shittier sound card aside, Ubuntu’s install is very easy, and it looks just stunning. I’m pretty sure I’ll like it once I get it working. For the moment I’m back on Windows.