Lorena’s laptop computer has been running Windows XP since we got it. I dual booted to Kubuntu for awhile, but with one thing and another, we started experiencing Blue Screens of Death (BSOD’s) when we ran XP and the wireless networking and a couple of other things were not working exactly like we wanted it in Kubuntu. It dawned on me that I really might have a resource problem, so I formatted the hard drive and installed Xubuntu. It is awesome. The wireless works better than it ever did with Windows XP or Kubuntu (I did some ad hoc download testing to figure that out), it is very snappy and does everything we want it to do.

The things we want it to do are pretty typical of a laptop. We want to be able to do the following:

  • Read and write email (Thunderbird)
  • Access the other computers and printers on the network (CUPS and SAMBA)
  • Browse the web (Firefox with AdblockPlus plugin)
  • Blogging (Performancing Firefox plugin)
  • FTP (FireFTP Firefox plugin)
  • Word processing (Abiword)
  • Spreadsheets (Gnumeric)
  • Talk to Grandma Conchita in Mexico (Skype)
  • Instant messaging (GAIM)
  • Webcam (Camorama and XAWTV)

In addition, I would like to be able to do some programming so I added KDevelop and a couple of other things, but that was not the main purpose of this exercise. The main purpose of the exercise was to get a piece of trash computer back into a usable state. This worked great. My buddy Lyle Waldo has an even worse computer coming along in the next few days that we are going to upgrade with Xubuntu, too. It is a computer that started out life as a Windows ME computer, but was upgraded (and I use the term upgraded quite loosely in this case) with Windows XP. It has a USB wireless dongle that we will need to make work and a few other challenges, but I think we can manage it all quite nicely.

Even though our experience was overwhelmingly positive yesterday, there was one big challenge that the normal user will not have to confront. The Automatix2 website was down all weekend, so we had to hand install Skype and the wireless stuff. I have not yet installed all the fonts and the DVD player because it was not as important as the other stuff and I know it is very easy with Automatix. I would highly recommend assuring that you can get the Automatix upgrades unless you are pretty comfortable with the linux command line and with foraging about in ubuntuforums.org.