Seeing family and installing the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta

Hey Bryan, does that mean you are now down only eight?  Are we tied?

We went to an absolutely wonderful funeral on Saturday for my Aunt Alma.  I spoke about her in an earlier post.  A lot of our extended family from Dad’s side was there.  We all got together at the Cottage Grove VFW hall after the funeral for a potluck.  I had good talks with my Uncle Richard’s son Ricky, my other cousins, Merle and Gary Carpenter, Dick and Carol Waldo, Uncle Ron, Aunt Fern, and many others.  It was especially good to have good talks with Bonnie Sykes and Tom Hinkle who both had amazing parts in the funeral.  It turns out that Bonnie and Alma had been very good friends.  Alma asked that she have a part in the funeral.  Our elder from our meeting and his wife, Jim and JoAnn Waldo showed up at the funeral along with Mark and Nancy Ramsdell.  Their presence was very greatly appreciated.

We had Kent Williston and Lyle Waldo stay with us for the weekend.  We have been having a very nice time with them.  As we were going to Sunday morning fellowship meeting, our neighbor was pulling out to go fishing.  I made some snippy comment about how it was sad that he was not going to church.  It really is sad, but that evening he brought us a really nice mess of trout that Kent showed us how to clean and we were able to have an absolutely wonderful fish and tamale fry.  For lunch we had Truman and Elinore Weld over and had a nice talk with them.  They surely do not let Elinore’s wheelchair slow them down at all.

On Friday night, Lyle and I ran down to Costco and bought a new monitor and to Staples to buy a cheap wireless card.  We rearranged the computers to put together an old system to run the CNC router we have downstairs.  I was amazed how easy it came up.  I installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 and LinuxCNC on the system, hooked it up to the CNC machine and it ran like a charm.  I am going to have to get a new stepper motor for one of the axes, but other than that it worked extremely well. 

After that we were so inspired with our computer that we decided to download the new Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 to install on Lorena’s laptop.  That is the one she uses to talk with her mother in Mexico on Skype.  The new Ubuntu is amazing.  The best thing is that it only took me 15 minutes to get my wireless going this time.  It would have been less, but I had to download a special driver for the wireless chip set in the laptop.  The wireless is fundamentally more pain free than the wireless support in Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10.  If Ubuntu keeps improving at its current rate, Microsoft is going to be in big trouble on the desktop.  For the first time ever, Christian remained engaged for more than five minute with the games that came standard with the distribution.  If an eleven year old boy remains engaged with the games after having spent hours and hours on Civilization IV, Age of Empire, Zoo Tycoon, and the Sim games, Linux is getting a lot closer.  His favorite is Globulation, but there was a great billiards game and I do not know what else.  I would not recommend downloading Feisty for another month or so unless you are game to do a few things from the command line because the Automatix package that automatically loads realplayer, flash, acrobat, some special drivers, skype, and some other stuff will not be available until after the official Feisty release next month.  There are still issues with the distribution, but they certainly seem less onerous than Vista’s issues.  If Ubuntu is not ready for prime time, it is very, very close.