Turn it around … today. Sometimes many things seem to be out of your control. For instance, you might not be able to fix your car because you don’t know anything about transmissions or fuel injection. Or maybe you missed that promotion because some guy is spreading rumors. The solution? View the problem as an opportunity to learn about car engines or influencing people. Start small and work your way up. It’ll improve your life dramatically.
Last week, for some reason or other, Windows started giving me the blue screen. Every time I booted I was stuck. As it’s a company laptop I am not allowed to reinstall or mess with Windows, so I have to wait until the technician comes and solve the problem. Which will probably take at least a week. As my main computer is currently in storage, I was stuck and considered watching my entire DVD collection back-to-back for the next week. However, where others would have stopped, I remembered to start small and I bravely marched on. I remembered Linux Live CDs. In particular Knoppix, but I had been willing to try Ubuntu for a while now. I happily discovered that Ubuntu‘s install CD is also a live CD, so of I went. It has been a few years since my last Linux experience, so I was anxious to find out the current state of Linux.
And I must say, I was not disappointed. Because this is running of a CD, it takes quite a while to start, but once everything is loaded you hardly notice you’re running from CD. Every one has already told so, but you must see this to believe: Ubuntu is very very polished. No need to enter any kind of weird parameters, or go into archaic terminal screens. All my hardware was immediately detected and usable. A feature pretty much unthinkable a few years back, especially on laptops.
The default set of applications is enough to get a good impression of what’s possible. And it’s all pretty nicely integrated with a clean and consistent theme. The only hurdle I encountered is that it’s currently impossible to get the LiveCD persistence working without a customized CD. Because I will be running this for a few days from LiveCD, I would have liked to store configuration data on a USB stick. This is called persistence, but it’s currently not functional.
I must say, if it wasn’t that Windows had all the games, this would be the next OS when I unpack my desktop. It might just be. Many emulators are available for DOS and Windows.
Try it out today, it will only take you about half an hour to get the image, burn it and boot into a different world.