Turned my whole world upside down
October 5th, 2004 | Published in good news!
After having numerous issues with Gentoo in the last few days, I finally decided to bite the bullet and install Ubuntu this morning. I managed to get it installed within an hour, but had some issues because I interrupted the post-reboot installation of the remaining packages and then had issues resuming the process after configuring apt to use the local COSI mirror.
I also spent a good portion of the afternoon trying to get XFree86 working (finally realized that it was a combination of missing modelines and bad refresh rates). I was pleasantly surprised once X was up and running because Ubuntu not only has some nice, clean menus, but they also include gthumb, gimp, and a ton of other popular desktop apps by default. Additionally, for the first time ever, my laptop’s power management stuff is properly configured so I can actually suspend my laptop without getting a kernel oops.
Went to see Paul Horn (senior VP and director of research for IBM) talk as part of a Shipley lecture. The talk was very good, especially because in answering Donny’s question about teaching open technologies in academia he mentioned that it’s great that Clarkson has started embracing Linux and that open source is great (if only we had time to talk to him afterwards).
We did catch the attention of a reporter for the Watertown Daily Times who asked for some reactions to the talk. Eli and I then took him to the COSI Lab and spent the better part of an hour explaining Linux and open source software.
