My PC is funtimes again!!

You know what’s a lot of fun in a nerdy way? Setting up a new computer! I remember with great fondness the olden days, over 10 years ago now, when my Dad bought our first proper PC (IBM Compatible was the old term), a P75 with Window 95. 8MB of ram, an 850MB hard drive and a 1MB graphics card.

Frankly, it was a sod to get working. We were fiddling with DOS memory managers and tinkering with the Autoexec.bat and config.sys a hell of a lot to get the thing working. But to me, that was part of the fun! The charm of a computer to me was always the tinkering, learning a little about the system and the files that make it go. In my younger days I learnt a fair bit of BASIC on my old Amstrad CPC. That’s just me, I’m a little bit geeky like that!

So in recent years, Windows has become something of a disappointment to me. It never needs anything like that sort of poking around in system files anymore, it’s just frustrating driver installs and constant re-starting of the machine. Frankly, I was becoming a tad bored with it. So recently, I decided to try something a little different and downloaded a copy of Linux. The latest Ubuntu, 9.04, to be exact.

You know what? I fricking love it!

A lot of people say they enjoy Ubuntu because it ‘just works’. Now, as I explained earlier, that’s not exactly what I’m after. Now, that’s not to say I want an OS that doesn’t work, I want an OS that’s got one or two compatibility issues that I can tinker with and learn a bit about the system as I fix them. So i enjoyed the installation of Ubuntu, as my wi-fi receiver was immediately recognised and functioning, which was a relief, but my monitor wasn’t firing on all resolutions. Brilliant! A little internet research and I learnt about the X.config and was able to modify it so the monitor works beautifully.

Since then, there’s been no requirement for me to do anything else like that. No requirement, but lots of opportunities! Which has been brilliant, as I’ve been able to learn about various aspects of the setup, what various system files all do, at my leisure and for fun! Note the word requirement there, I don’t want to be responsible for people being put off Linux because they think that it’ll be a difficult thing to setup. I had that one issue with my monitor, which I very easily found a fix for. The time spent researching and implementing that fix (which was longer that necessary as I wanted to learn more about what I was doing for curiousity rather than just immediately doing it) has easily been made back in the easy and speedy installation, the much faster start up time my machine now has and the fact that every other component of my PC was instantly set up by Ubuntu itself, saving me a lot of fiddling about with a pile of installation CD’s/ So don’t ever be put off by notions that Linux is difficult to set up or use. It’s not.

However, if you’re a bit geeky, like I am, it’s a hella lot of fun!