VT’s Tech Blog

This article is written by a friend of mine, Dr. Abhishek Puri. He’s a doctor who’s a technology freak on the side. He dabbles around with Open Source software and is a strong advocate for the Open Source community. Here is his experience with setting up Ubuntu 9.10 on his latest laptop.

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My trusty Lenovo laptop died on me as it had issues with it’s power supply. I had no other option but to sell off my three year old celeron powered workhorse which had served me rather well. However, the search for a new one proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated.

My search had been on for a system that would work on Linux flawlessly. For the past few years, I have come to love the reliability and the stability of Ubuntu and with it’s more frequent updates which give me the “best” in the desktop appearance. With an anemic RAM in the previous version, I could ill afford to run multiple applications, turn on anti aliasing of Open Office or even risk the opening up of multiple tabs while running Opera. At risk of a system freeze, it was still a workable and a usable laptop. The present day era is of 64 bit processors and it’s hard to justify their routine use for a casual user. Nevertheless, it has never been the user’s prerogative to choose.

A search in most of the electronic showrooms was quite disappointing. Most of the laptops on display were infested and infected by bloated crapware called as Windows. With jacked up prices for fancy video cards, it drove me away as I had a limited budget. I went running to my old trusty vendor who showed me a nearly perfect laptop for my needs with preloaded DoS. More than that, it had a great combination of a motherboard, an Intel chipset and integrated Wifi.

The Live USB version of Ubuntu worked great and after a quick lspci command in the terminal, I put down my hard earned money for a Compaq system.

The first thing was to format the hard drive, load up Ubuntu, apply the updates and viola a nearly perfect system was ready to use. After the mandatory load in of plug ins to ensure playback of restricted formats, it was all set up.

The only major issue surprisingly was with Opera 10.10. It used to crash the X randomly with the screen freezing up and an unresponsive keyboard. In any case, there was no solution from the forums except that I could try out Qt4 version. I decided to chuck it in favor of waiting for Opera 10.5 which promises to be a fab release due out for Unix in couple of months. I was indeed sore that the Windows version would be released first as they have huge amount of resources dedicated. This is because, Microsoft has been forced to give an option to consumers regarding the choice of browsers and Opera had been behind this landmark anti trust case. It only goes on to prove that Unix platform does offer a choice; but Opera has “cold shouldered” the Unix community as a whole since any reported bugs get scaled down on a lower priority till the new version comes out in the beta or the final release.

There is a plethora of browsers to choose from in Unix; yet I settled down on very remarkable and wonderful Google Chrome. It’s one of the most exciting software to have been released in recent times and although it doesn’t have the functionality as Opera in it’s default form, there are numerous extensions available for the same. Frankly, I have never been too happy about the extensions per se because I feel that the browser ought to have the key features built in. In any case, it all boils down to a personal choice though. For my mail and RSS feeds, I found that Evolution is a good alternative to Opera’s both inbuilt mail as well as RSS reader although the format has not really changed in the past few years. Yet, it works the works and I do miss Opera.

The icing on the cake is perhaps oodles of RAM being able to support Compiz Fusion and it’s brilliant and awesome effects. It’s sheer eye candy customisable to the nth detail and a great execution of details. Full kudos to the developers who have developed various plug ins; my favorite is the “burn” effect which burns down the window when you close it. You Tube is full of videos on this and it is indeed a school boy’s fantasy come true to own such a thing. Day in day out, I am fascinated by various effects and Mac Os looks pale in comparison in many respects.

It would not be feasible to run a full scale comparison with other platforms; this write up only details my purchase, the customization, the software and of course, the choices made. Your own experience may vary or some of the readers would want to defend the “latest” Windows 7. Yet, my arguments stay in place that “free” open source software can outperform the “closed” systems by a mile.
Ubuntu 9.10 is a great option; admittedly, there are tons of other distros that would have their adherents too. But then Open Source is all about the choice.

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Picture Credit: Laptop picture has a Creative commons license from Otacon_85 on flickr