Wednesday, February 8th, 2006, 5:17 pm
Ubuntu and Mandriva 2006
Next generation of GNOME (source)
KDE inherits Apple’s fancy dress
N my recent vacation, I made a someone’s wish come true. I finally spent time working on a dual-boot Ubuntu setting for a friend, whom I have known since the age of 5. We both grew up on DOS, but in due time got fed up with unreliable Microsoft Windows, following its more successful days which were symbolised by Windows 3.1/3.11, 95 and maybe 98 as well (though that is where its value began to dive).
I made some gentle encouragement to make Linux the exclusive booting choice, but my friend will have to become accustomed to Linux one step at a time. This is no exception. Data migration, as well as migration of software and habit is required. Finally, he got excited about urging his parents to switch approximately 20 machines at their factory to Linux. An hour of explaining the Linux mantra and inner mechanisms was well invested. That guy is now on Mandriva 2006 as I recommended a KDE-based distribution with an AMD 64-bit processor support. Having ditched Ubuntu, he was even more satisfied, yet he kept all the installation CD’s, which he may distributed and disseminate to others.
In the process of migration, Linux (the distributions rather) received compliments on ease of installation, customisation ability, functionality and the number of available programs. We initially encountered issues due to an “expert” installlation of Ubuntu. These were attributed to privileges, which are supposed to protect the users from themselves. Ubuntu is intended for non-systems administrators, but I sometimes think that it goes too far, which can be counter-intuitive.