Posts Tagged ‘installation’

How not to get bored while installing an operating system

Traditionally, installing (or re-installing) an operating system was a dull job. You’d feed your machine with floppy disks (or a single floppy and a single CD if you were lucky) and wait for ages while an hourglass twizzled around. And the screen would be full of platitudes, in a retro-VGA-style, about how much better your life would be. And a chorus of Angels would sing to hail the new computing experience. (Or they would if there were any sound drivers which worked by default).

But now things are different. I give you Ubuntu 8.10.

I must admit, I’m a long-time Linux zealot, having started with Slackware 1.something with (I think) a 1.3.20 kernel. I did install it from floppy disks. I did cycle from home to University campus several times with bundles of floppies containing XFree86. I did rashly install Netscape Navigator and wondered if I’d miss NCSA Mosaic. *sigh*

Back to the present. I’m installing Ubuntu on this laptop. I’m also browsing the web and writing this blog post. On the same machine. It booted from a USB stick into a usable system and is installing in the background.

And here’s the inspiration for this post, an example of how polished the system is:
Migrating stuff from other OSes

Yep, I know. Hardly earth-shattering. But these are the missing bits of fluff that Gnu/Linux distros have been missing.

Anyway… while it’s installing, I’ve got some web-browsing to do. (Did I mention that I can do that? Wirelessly? Oh…)

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Filed under tech : Comments (0) : Nov 4th, 2008