When i was two my dad brought home our first Apple IIe. We had berenstain bears teach counting or something on 5.25 inch floppy. I didn't care for those nasty bears; little chunky was more interested in the disk it came on and the nasty yellow and black box it plugged in to. I guess i've always been a computer geek.
I was looking for a hobby, so i picked up a second computer off of schuler for 60 bucks. I spent $10 on a monitor at goodwill and $40 on a wireless network adaptor. The machine was a dell jason had bought when he was married (the computer was named 'jaylin' in XP, har...) and was four or so years old. Pentium 4, 2.0 ghz. Looked like jason had kicked the ram up from 256 to 700something, plus he'd tacked on a few other goodies...a dvd burner, a new graphics card.
Jaylin ran XP service pack 2, poorly. The thing was serious slow, a real awful bitch to use. After running it like that for a bit and growing increasingly frustrated, i decided that windows was the problem and to give something else a try. After using the open source mozilla firefox as a browser for two years i felt that free software was coming into it's own, and the time was ripe for trying a new, free OS. I fucking hate windows, and am to poor to own a mac. So i downloaded Ubuntu 8.04, an OS running the GNOME GUI over the linux kernel. yeah, fucking geeky, i know. Then i installed it on my computer...DRUNK.
I wasn't really drunk at the onset; but if you've ever done any serious computer project you know that it can take HOURS. And my computer is right next to my fridge. I hit a few bumps b/c of this....namely, i accidently completely fucked XP. Oh well. I'm not missing it.
I know that most of you aren't this hardcore geeky. I don't think any of you, even chris, would post screenshots of your desktop. but fuck it. for $100 i've got a machine that never crashes and do eyecandy beter than vista. Vista wouldn't even run on this computer. I would definetly recommend going with Ubuntu Linux to anyone willing to invest the time. The one downside is you have to be willing to be a problem solver, and get creatvie if things fuck up. Anyway, there's always google to answer your questions.
UPADATE FOR CHRIS:
okay blogger won't let me post url's and whatnot in the comments, as far as i can tell anyway, so i'll just add all yr goodies here.
Get Ubuntu here. it's a .iso file. you might want do a checksum on it after you download to make sure it's not corrupted....google about to find out how to do this, it's been awhile but it seems like it was a <1meg>Admistration>Synaptic Package Manger) to do all kinds of wicked shit. i would reccomend searching and installing compiz fusion from synaptic. this will add Advanced Desktop Settings to System>Preferences. that's how i've got all the wicked desktop shit going on now.
anyway good luck, if you decide to do it. it's really worth it....the included apps work great (Pigdin for IM, Transmission for torrents, GIMP for photoshoping, etc, Firefox for internet). the soulseek client for linux is called nicotine plus, and you can find it through synaptic. Have fun. this shit is cool.
2 comments:
aight, i've got that old dell laptop whose original boot disk and recovery setup has dell software built into it, i.e. ain't just windows that makes the fucker go. any issues when you did you tower?
i'm down for this, but don't wanna create an unusable brick, as i don't have the recovery disk and they refuse to issue one to anyone but the original owner, who is now out of touch and far removed.
any ideas?
thank you, on multiple levels.
1, my shit will be as badass as yours.
2, nobody ele knows what the fuck we're talking about and you never lost me. feels like a small victory on my part as i've been out of solid nerdom computer wise. i'll hi you up in the next couple days for basic issues, but this shit is as good as done son.....
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