So, not too long ago, I upgraded from Ubuntu 09.10 to 10.04 – and I’m glad I did.

Quick Overview

From the very start, 10.04 looked sleeker, worked faster, and the basic pack­age installed sev­eral use­ful appli­ca­tions to make the user expe­ri­ence excit­ing. Lucid Lynx (10.04) improved sev­eral fea­tures from Jaunty Jack­a­lope (09.10) – the soft­ware cen­ter is sim­pler, it installed the upgraded ver­sion of OpenOf­fice, and over­all the sys­tem seems more balanced.

Improv­ing 10.04

One web­site you need to visit after you install the oper­at­ing sys­tem is www.ubuntuguide.org; it pro­vides an exten­sive list of programs/add-ons for Ubuntu with easy to fol­low instruc­tions to install them. I per­son­ally installed the fol­low­ing applications:

• Ban­shee Music Player

• GIMP Image Editor

• Inkscape Vec­tor Graphic Editor

• Filezilla

• Thun­der­bird Email Client

• Vir­tu­al­Box

Every­thing installed with­out any issues and run beautifully…

A Big Pleas­ant Surprise

So, another com­puter in the office has been rid­dled with Spy­ware, Mal­ware, and Viruses for awhile – we’ll clean them up and a short time later they would sprout back up. I’ve threat­ened for a year to put Linux on the machine but I wasn’t sure how the user would take it… Well, she was going to be out of the office for a cou­ple day so I thought that it would be the PERFECT time to do it…

I backed every­thing up (which took a day in itself!) and before going to bed, I started to install process… Every­thing installed per­fectly find – copied back all her files/photos/music – installed some extra appli­ca­tions I fig­ured she would appre­ci­ate and then my big pleas­ant sur­prise… If you remem­ber, there was no direct tool avail­able to migrate OUTLOOK into a non-windows email client. PST files are depen­dent on some pro­pri­etary win­dows libraries… So, when I opened Evo­lu­tion, I was fully pre­pared to do my work around, when all of a sud­den I noticed an open in Evo­lu­tion 2.28 that would allow import from a PST file…

Now, I thought at the time, “right, this must be a but­ton for future inte­gra­tion…” But, I tried it, and waited a long, long, long time – the PST file I was import­ing was 11GB… and wow was I sur­prised when it did in fact import all her email… I’m still a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that I haven’t found a way to import CONTACT data out of OUTLOOK, but that is more of an OUTLOOK issue than any­thing else. OUTLOOK 2007 doesn’t have an export con­tact option.

The strange thing is I wanted to read more about this won­der­ful import fea­ture the smart peo­ple work­ing on the Evo­lu­tion project imple­mented – there is noth­ing! In fact, they dis­cuss workaround options just like I dis­cov­ered! It’s almost like the devel­op­ment team doesn’t even know they’ve solved this riddle…

Issues

After I installed 10.04 my Rhythm­box Music Player would open then imme­di­ately close – this was an issue on sev­eral instal­la­tions I made around the office – I tried work­ing it out, but once I dis­cov­ered Ban­shee Music Player I fell in love with it and unin­stalled Rhythm­box and just went with Banshee…

Another issue I had, which actu­ally started with 09.10 was ‘CONNECT TO SERVER’ down­loaded extremely slow to my web servers. I installed Filezilla a real FTP client and it solved the issue. I’ve read numer­ous places it has some­thing to do with PASSIVE con­nec­tion ver­sus ACTIVE – I never really tried to fix it so I don’t know how dif­fi­cult it would be to turn PASSIVE mode off…

The instal­la­tion itself proved to be an issue on two installs. The grub installer wouldn’t install prop­erly caus­ing the com­puter to hang indef­i­nitely. Dur­ing the instal­la­tion process it wanted to install grub in front of the par­ti­tions (SDA) – once I spec­i­fied a par­ti­tion (SDA1) every­thing was fine… I’m not sure why this is, and why it was a prob­lem on two of four instal­la­tions. It may actu­ally be a hard drive issue and not a GRUB issue.

Over­all Impressions

Again, I have no regrets going from Microsoft Win­dows to Ubuntu Linux. I don’t pre­tend to be a Linux purist, some­one who is in love with the small foot­print of work­ing with the ter­mi­nal prompt. I have cer­tainly become more and more com­fort­able with the ter­mi­nal, but the GNOME GUI is nice and easy to work with – much more intu­itive than Win­dows. Plus, with proces­sor speed these days and the fact my machine has 4gigs of Ram, I never run into resource issues. Besides that, if your machine is used to run­ning Win­dows, the biggest install of Ubuntu, with every bell and whis­tle you can think of will still run leaner than the stan­dard Win­dows install.

And just FYI: I’ll prob­a­bly be build­ing myself another com­puter here in a cou­ple months just to upgrade every­thing – what kind of com­puter geek would I be if I didn’t!  And I’m happy to report that the Win­dows to Ubuntu Linux tran­si­tion has been met with much hap­pi­ness and sat­is­fac­tion from the com­puter I upgraded that had the Mal­ware issues…