One of the side-effects of the PC blowing up is that I got to recycle my old dust-gathering PC box and upgrade it. My old box was made with a dizzying array of salvaged, recycled, refurbished and purchased parts. No wonder nothing ever really quite worked on it.

With the now-freshly-upgraded box, I go to start all over again and part of that was choosing a new Linux distro. I’ve tried a few - Red Hat, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Debian, Knoppix with varying degrees of success. This time around, I chose Ubuntu after some reading.

Installations were always the kicker for me - if I could get past that, and get a distro to actually boot I was a fan. Red Hat, back in 1998, was overly complex and difficult to partition, Mandrake 9.0 had a cute GUI but was sometimes hard to boot, and Debian - forget it. I wanted to love Debian, I really did.

That’s probably why I was so keen to try Ubuntu - as it is based on Debian, but is much easier to install and use. It uses the Debian install procedure, but is much simpler. Partitioning is still complex (mostly due to fear over accidentally erasing things) but a little easier than it used to be. The entire install took less than an hour, about the same as Windows XP. And relief - it even booted.

On first impressions, Ubuntu is very, very nice. Long gone are the days when you’d be dropped to a command line to start your window manager (unless you choose, of course). Open Office 2.0 and Firefox are installed by default. I’m a fan.