Christopher Moore is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC with his wife and two children.My wife’s hard drive crashed. I believe it was a mechanical failure, so pretty much no hope for recovery. Thankfully, I had a PuppyLinux CD in my office, so last week she had a functioning operating system that allowed her to check the weather and email. I bought a new hard drive and opted not to reinstall Windows Vista.
I didn’t reinstall Vista since the computer did not come with disks. I’m kind of glad. Initially I was going to do a full install of PuppyLinux, since it is probably the fasted OS I have ever played around with, running completely from RAM. However, it is a little clunky, installing stuff can be tricky, and I believe it would take four PhDs in computer engineering to get it to recognize the wireless card in the laptop.
I burned an Ubuntu 9.04 install disk to give it a whirl. I had an older version of Ubuntu as a boot option on my wife’s computer before, but I could never get the wireless card to work, so it sat unused. I had gone ahead and bought a new wireless card that had been verified to work on Linux, so I figured I’d give Ubuntu a chance again, since I use it at work from time to time.
Ubuntu 9.04 is awesome. It recognized the built-in wireless card automatically. I could never get this card to work with every other distro of linux I have tried (including older Ubuntu versions). I just spent $15 on a wireless card that I don’t even need!
Ubuntu starts up and apps pop up almost as fast as with PuppyLinux, and waaaaaay faster than Vista. Furthermore, it comes with Firefox, OpenOffice and Gimp pre-loaded. Puppy does not. Overall, I’m very impressed. I like Puppy, since I can run it off of a CD and it uses so few resources. If I ever come across a really cheap (< $50) old laptop, then I'll buy it and run Puppy. However, Ubuntu is quite a bit more polished.
The best part, though, is Edubuntu. I have a two-year old that LOVED to play Purple Place on Vista. I needed something to satisfy him. Gcompris (pronounced all Frenchy) on the Edubuntu pre-schooler suite is great and actually educational as opposed to what comes with Vista.
So far, I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu. We’ll see what my wife and son think over the next few weeks.