Ubuntu Linux rave

At the Trivia Night on the 1st August, I bought a new computer at the auction. James had put it together to be auctioned, so we knew it would be a quality product :yes: I think it's my first new computer in about 15 years- all of my upgrades sine the old 486 have been hand-me-downs.

I wasted no time in installing a proper Operating System i.e. Linux. I had previously used Debian but I decided this time to give Ubuntu a whirl.

It took a while to download and install all the software, but everything pretty well as worked out of the box, as they say.

The reason why I chose Ubuntu is that I have never been able to synchronise my PDA which runs on Windows Mobile 5 with my desktop. There is a suite of programs (SynCE and OpenSync) which are supposed to provide that functionality from the Linux side, but I had never been able to get it to run on Debian. With the Ubuntu packages available on the SynCE web-site, I decided to download them and give it a go. It worked like a charm! Brilliant! There are a few anomalies with repeating appointments- there is a known bug where some appointments are shifted by an hour, but I've got some that are shifted by a day! After a couple of syncs, I thought it was going to be a winner- but it stopped working and I'm having on-going discussions with the developers.

The new desktop came with a built-in card reader. I noticed the other day that if I plugged my USB memory stick into it, it didn't detect it. I thought maybe there were driver issues or something of the sort. I tested a couple of cards on it (a CF and a SD card) and they were instantly detected and opened in the file manager. Then I plugged my camera into the USB port and it worked fine. What the? as my boys would say :) Turns out that the USB port on these particular devices is fractionally too deep and so some devices just don't make contact.

James mentioned that the card reader comes with drivers for Windows. I was puzzled as to why it would need drivers in Windows when Ubuntu just finds it without extra drivers. He said the driver just gives it fancy icons that light up when you have a card in a slot. Personally I prefer the OS to just open the file manager and show you what's on it... the icon that the file manager shows is pretty cool looking anyway (by which I mean it's pretty obvious that the system has found your card and knows what it is and what's on it).

Overall I'm very impressed with the hardware and software. It's nice to be able to run things and not be waiting too long for them to start. I was quite happy with my previous computer, but this one is just another few steps further along.

When I get the PDA and the desktop talking to each other then I will be really happy! Not that my joy or happiness really depend on things or technology or anything like that... but I do get a bit of a buzz when all my toys play together happily :hat: