Moving to Ubuntu 11:04

Over the weekend I moved my Asus netbook to Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. It still has Windows 7 Starter and I won't be getting rid of that, but I've long wanted to make the move to Linux, and now may be the time.

The install of Ubuntu was easy: go to website, download Wubi, an installation program that runs under Windows, let Wubi do its thing and when the computer re-starts, choose Ubuntu from the Grub menu. First time around, it takes a while, and it's a short on feedback. At one point I was clicking and hitting keys at random because the damn thing wasn't saying or doing anything but seemed to be very busy.

Just after the Desktop comes up, it prompted me, from something that looks identical to the OS X wireless network symbol, to join a wireless network and when supplied with passwords did so with no fuss. The previous times I've tried installing Ubuntu, it didn't want to know about my wireless network, for all that I followed the instructions for ndiswrapper. I used to say that I would go over to Ubuntu when it "just did" wireless networking, and now it does.

I need Open Office, Chrome, Evernote, a music player and Dropbox. Chrome and Dropbox come in .deb files for Ubuntu and the install is, well, automatic but not very polished. Clicking on a righteously constituted .deb directory should start up Ubuntu Software Centre, which should take care of the process on its own. Its progress bar gets a little way across and vanishes, only to re-appear almost done a while later, and the whole computer just stopped responding while the install was going on.

Installing Open Office had me looking for advice on the web (at a site called OMG! Ubuntu) and using Terminal. It turns out that you have to install a program to convert something in the Open Office files from one format to another, and another program to run that other formatted file. Once you've done that the Open Office Installer runs just as fast, if not faster, than it does on Windows 7. You would think a company with Oracle's resources would have built a slick install routine.

Evernote is not available for Linux, but an intrepid and seemingly lone developer out there as developed Nevernote, a clone with all the functionality a text-basher like me needs. The Ubuntu Software Centre told me off for trying to install a package that was missing some hash constant-sounding thingy, but let me carry on anyone. Feeding my username and password into Nevernote, pressing Sync and waiting about three minutes got me my notes.

There's a version of the OS X Dock on the left-hand side of the screen, and I put my programs onto it while taking off Libre Office and other stuff I don't want.

I had to faff around the filesystem a bit before locating the NTFS directories and more importantly the iTunes directory for my music files. Ubuntu makes Banshee the default player, and it looks like an early iTunes. It will also recognise any AAC / MP3 files you have already in your iTunes directory and import them to its catalogue, so there was no need to re-load my music. It even found a lot of the album art.

You need to remember.... CaSe SENsitiVe!! Linux is, while Windows isn't. This matters when you are in the Terminal or for directory paths, but doesn't seem so important in the GUI.

The rest is about getting every little thing working the way I want: things like mouse speed, scrolling, appearance, default programs and the like. That takes a while.

I did all this without having RTFM, or indeed any FM, on Ubuntu. I suspect that I'll be getting one of the manuals on 11.04 and learning some more stuff.

Ubuntu / Linux developers need to polish the install routine. Regular folk like me who use computers to Do Real-World Stuff (as opposed to Doing Computer Stuff) do not want to get involved with the operating system. We want our software. Installation has to be as simple and as full of feedback as it is on Windows or as seemingly instant as it is in OS X.

However, I'm looking forward to the experiment. What would it take for me to abandon Windows on the Asus? If Irfan Skiljan would release his peerless IrfanView program for Linux, that would be it.