Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Linux Looking Good

Those who know me well, know that I like OS X, Windows and Linux depending on the situation. I've used Linux off and on since the day of Yggdrasil Linux back around 1993. At the time I was also running MS-DOS, Amiga Workbench, MacOS 6 and OS/2. While my main OS is OS X, I still use Linux from time to time. Today I installed Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my Windows 7 machine at the office. All I can say is WOW.

The machine is an older 3.0 GHz Pentium 4. Hyper-threaded but no dual core. It has 2 GB of DDR memory, two 250GB SATA hard drives and a DVD burner. Video is provided by an nVidia 6800GT AGP video card. Yes, kinda outdated by it runs Windows 7 Home Premium pretty dang well.

I downloaded the burned the ISO, then booted off it on the machine. That pretty much let me see what all the fuss is about. It identified my PCI based wireless card and connected to the office network once i entered the password. It saw my nVidia graphics card and let me know there were non-open source drivers available for it. Everything seemed to work so I went ahead and told it to install to the hard drive. Yeah, I was brave, my system was backed up and I wanted to see how it handled being installed with Windows 7.

After examining my computer, it only offered me the main drive (C:) and with a click or two, had resized the drive to free up space for a 40GB partition and installed itself. Seven steps later, I'd rebooted and the GRUB loader offered me Ubuntu or Windows 7. The steps were things like language, time zone and keyboard country. It got the time zone wrong thinking Denver. My guess is because that's the main location of our T1 provider.

This time I let it install the video driver. I then set up Empathy chat client that's supplied and embedded into the OS. It handles most every chat system out there as well as broadcast services like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. The mail link on it ties into Evolution, the pervasive mail, todo and calendar app on every Linux box.

All the usual suspects are present: Firefox, a few games, OpenOffice, F-Spot Photo Manager, Rhythmbox Music Player and even basic scanning software. In other words, out of the "box" Ubuntu is a brain-dead easy install that provides the basic software everyone needs for a desktop computer.

Going to Facebook, I fired up Farmville, a flash based game from Zynga. The page said that I needed to upgrade my version of Flash (since it isn't open source, I doubt it was installed in the first place) which I did by clicking the provided link. Massive Fail! None of the links on Adobe's site would actually let me download Flash until I chose to open the link in a new window. I don't know of this was Firefox or the website. Once I did that, I was offered Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and had to choose between YUM, .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb for Ubuntu 8.04+ and APT for Ubuntu 9.04+. Pretending to be a newbie, I chose YUM instead of APT. Surprisingly, it worked oerfectly, opening in Archive Manager. However, being a Newbie (for this) I didn't know the folder to pick for extraction. When I went back and chose APT, Firfox didn't know what to use for opening the file. Ok, three strikes.

So it's up to the Application menu and the Ubuntu Software Center. I clicked on "Get Software", entered Flash in the search box and was offered 100 items with Adobe Flash plugin being the 4th choice. I clicked it, clicked install, entered my computer password in about 30 seconds later, had Flash installed. Well, so I thought. Neither Farmville nor certain parts of Mafia Wars would load, even after restarting Firefox.

So on Flash install... major fail.

Next stop, Pogo.com to test Java. When I went to play Jungle Gin, Pogo informed me that I needed the Java plugin, then gave me four options... RPM, self-extracting and the same two but for x64 based Linux boxes. They provided instructions that require going to terminal and becoming root. Easy enough but not for the newbie. So back to the Ubuntu Software Center.

Needless to say, there are a number of java apps in the repository. Enough to scare off newbies. Here to gave up on the newbie aspect, and installed Ubuntu Restricted Extras. This provides in one go, MP3 playback, Microsoft Fonts, Java, Flash, etc.

This package too a lot longer to download and install. But it did so automatically. Flash apps on Facebook now worked properly and Pogo's Jungle Gin started to load the room, but just sat there. Not a good sign. Going to java.com and clicking "Do I have Java" it ook me to Pogo which said "you have the plugin installed and are ready to play." Except nothing came up.

Finally it was off to Second Life. I'm not on there much these days, but wanted to test the system. Now I don't care for the new 2.x Official Linden Labs client, so I downloaded the latest version of the Emerald Viewer. It opened in Archive Manager and I extracted it to a bin folder on my home folder. No, a newbie wouldn't know to do that. Worked perfectly.

Ok, one final test before going home for the day... I went to the places menu, clicked on 210GB file System (my old C: drive) and sure enough, it showed me the contents of the NTFS Windows 7 drive and let me create files there. Nice!

In summary... Ubuntu 10.04 is easily the most blonde/newbie friendly install I've ever done. Anyone would be able to install Linux on their computer with this. With a little help from someone for things like Flash and Java installs, a Lucid Lynx computer would do for the average computer user. However, we're not there quite there yet.