When I received my free Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CD by mail, I wasn’t planning to install Ubuntu at all. Eventhough I support the open source movement, I’m still not a big fan of linux as an end user. I thought maybe that could change, just maybe Linux had evolved by now. And believe me, it had been a very, very long time since I tried a new linux distro. Fedora was installed on my machine and I didn’t even remember the password to login to the system. Heck, it was time to install Ubuntu. Dadada ….

Ubuntu first boots up a live distribution, meaning that you can use nearly all the features of the operating system without installing it in the first place. This improves the user experience tremendously, since you can listen to music, play games or browse the web while the system is busy installing Ubuntu on your computer. I remembered the old days of waiting 30 minutes in front of the computer, being able to do nothing while Windows is being installed.

The setup took roughly 10 minutes, but it was not without problems. Ubuntu couldn’t configure grub properly and I had to spend the whole day just to figure out what went wrong. As it turns out, both of my harddisks were configured as slave and Ubuntu was not clever enough. I became more disappointed when I noticed that the default installation doesn’t let you watch DVDs, listen to MP3s or view PDFs and requires some configuration. Nevertheless, I had a chance to try out XGL and it is very cool. While it isn’t revolutionary, XGL is a promising precursor of what to expect in the future. In the end, Linux is pretty complicated even for a computer whiz and still not suitable for home users.