I've mentioned before that I have never had a chance, or desire, to run Linux in any long term way. I've played with both Ubuntu and Mandrake (before the owners of the comic got it's name changed), but I've mostly run FreeBSD at home and the last year and a half I've been running OpenSolaris.
Last night, after much frustration, I finally got Ubuntu installed next to the metal on my laptop. I say next to the metal, because I have been running it in Virtual Box for about a year. The frustrations have mostly been around backing up all my data, and then I found out I had downloaded and burned a cd with the i386 version of Ubuntu, which would not boot. It took me a while, but I finally found the amd64 version. After that, things went really well.
So far, I've gotten everyone a login, setup NFS to the FreeBSD box so I can copy files from the backup, and gotten access to my email, etc. My first impressions are that it is much nicer looking and that it feels faster. I say feels, because I don't think it actually is faster, but the interface has a snapper feel. I worry that the UI is optimized to the detriment of the stability of the system. I.e., does it cache a lot of data in member instead of making sure it makes it to the disk. In that case, what happens if the computer crashes (a worry I have because this Gateway laptop overheats a lot).
Tonight I'll install a Java development environment and really customize things the way I want them. So far, I'm really pleased.
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