Installing now. I went with the full distro but was unable to get into the Gnome U/I, so now I’m on the “safe” install with the hopes I can use it to establish a permanent install on the harddrive. Ahh … that’s better. I don’t do command line interfaces anymore — BASHing my way through the thickets of Linux is an exercise and futility — but the GUI loader is much more friendly to wanna-be Linux geeks like myself.
This is fun. Nice to see a new OS.
Why Ubuntu? SuSE was a massive drag — it isn’t moron friendly and insisted on DHCP configuration or IP configs which didn’t yield success. That said, Dan Lyons at Forbes has been playing with SuSE 10.1 and is happy with it, which is why I went that path in the first place.
Why am I doing this to myself? I want to know what the OOTBE (out of the box experience) would be for an average user trying to mess with an alternative OS. That’s all. I can predict that the install will utterly strand me in terms of productivity given Lenovo’s allegiance to Lotus Notes (the skin disease of productivity applications) and Lotus SameTime — the crack cocaine of Lenovo communications.
Unless someone knows of a Notes port to Linux …. which, given IBM’s pledge of allegiance to opensource, might not be so far fetched ….
Have you considered putting VMWare (or whatever you like) on there? Most of the tech types I know swear by virtualization — in that same “why the crap haven’t I done this already?” way — for not only solving problems like getting your skin disease and crack up and running, but for day-to-day work in general. The first comment in this post outlines how one developer type I know uses VMWare.
Thanks. I have some first hand VMWare experience so I’ll look into an install to get Notes propped up.