MadMode

Dan Connolly's tinkering lab notebook

Ubuntu rocks!

Ubuntu rocks!

dajobe told me about Ubuntu during a break in our meeting, ironically, when I asked him for tips re my new PowerBook.

I tried a live CD but it's not really working yet. Then I tried to squeeze an installation in the unused 1.5GB of the 4GB disk in my kids' games PC. No joy. Disk full.

Then I talked to my kids about what they want their machine to do. "Connect to the Internet," they all said. No way I'm going to administer a win98 box connected to the net. So I asked if it was OK if their Disney games didn't work anymore, and they said yes. So I wiped the disk and finally got Ubuntu working.

Ubuntu rocks. gnome rocks. My kids love the gnome games. This is the most progress toward the debian jr. goals I've seen in a long time.

madwifi hardware support rocks. I got a DWL-G520 for $30 after rebates, and it worked 1st time, after installing the ubuntu restricted-modules package.

There's a bit of irony in that mostly my kids want to play cartoonnetwork.com games. The macromedia flash install process is pretty painless, but it stands out in contrast with the integration of the rest of Ubuntu. That's as it should be, I suppose: you should be very conscious when investing in software that's not open source.

OpenCroquet is... coming?

Alan Kay rides again... I grabbed the OpenCroquet release by bittorrent. It works, I guess... the UI doesn't pass the "can I figure it out in 30 seconds?" test required of, say, video games. I'll stay tuned...