Thursday 19 April 2007

Day 1 - Starting off

It was with considerable excitement that I downloaded the shiny new Ubuntu release. The download was painless and soon I had a CD to install on my existing Windows XP machine. The CD loaded and soon I was running through the wizard on the Live CD, I opted for the following partition setup:

Root 4.8Gb
Swap 1.9Gb
Home 8.6Gb

With this decision made the install started. After about 15 minutes I had a lovely new dual-boot system, running both Ubuntu and Win XP. Launching into Ubuntu for the first time I was selected the networking icon from the tray at the top right of the screen. This showed me that it had detected my wireless network, entering the relevant passwords resulted in a connection being made to the network! I was impressed, a smooth and utterly painless connection.


The next step was to install Automatix to enable quick installation of a few things that I knew I would need. The installation of Automatix didn't go smoothly, I kept getting errors about Python2.4 not being a satisfiable dependency. With a bit of fumbling around and help from the great guys at Automatix I got things going. It turned out that it was some sort of 'repo sync' issue. Anyway with that issue resolved I used Automatix to install Realplayer, Beagle and VirtualBox.

Realplayer is important to me because it allows me to listen to programs on the BBC's website. With this in place I set up Evolution to connect to several IMAP accounts, all of this worked very smoothly. I then used the Restricted Drivers Manager to set up the driver for my ATI Radeon X600 video card, this again worked so seamlessly that I was very pleasantly surprised.

Compared to setting up the same card on Windows this was as easy, if not easier. Having completed this task and carrying out the required reboot I discovered that my monitor was not running in the right resolution (1280x1024). Apparently it's not possible to change to this resolution using System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution. So I had to use sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg to add the correct resolution, once done I was running at the right resolution.

With this completed, I used Firefox to browse a few sites. The first day has been successful, so far!

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