When Kevin was in town this past weekend for our New Year’s celebration, I decided it might be a good time to up
grade Ubuntu on my PC (a PC which, I’ll note here, doesn’t get used a whole lot ).
Kevin’s a real guru when it comes to this Linux stuff. And thank goodness, because the Ubuntu upgrade didn’t go quite as smoothly as either of us expected it to. But it’s up and running now, and it works quite well.
Ubuntu comes along at an interesting time for me. With the advent of OS X, I’ve spent more time mucking around on the command line interface than I ever thought I would. In many significant ways, Ubuntu is a lot like OS X for x86 (and just in time for OS X on Intel, as it happens). The PC on which Ubuntu is running is a homebrew machine Kevin helped me build; it has a relatively fast processor, plenty of RAM, and a nice graphics card, so Ubuntu verily flies along. Frankly, for purposes of server admin, Web browsing, and e-mail, I’d be hard put to decide between Ubuntu and OS X on similar hardware. The downside to my present situation is that my PC (and 19″ CRT) use a LOT more energy than my Mini and iBook combined. It would be great to have a nice little laptop that could dual boot Ubuntu and OS X. Maybe one of the new iBooks?