Ubuntu goes on smooth and easy

Wow, that worked out nicely! In about 20 minutes I got Ubuntu fully installed with video and network support. It also has OpenOffice, IM and Email client, a BitTorrent client, and system utilities which look very similar to the ones you get with Windows, and full support for USB. Ok, so far I’m impressed with the Karmic Koala.

The hardware I’m using is my old Dell Dimension 515 with a Pentium 4 Hyperthreaded single core chip and 4GB of ram. The drive is the 640GB one that came with my new system (which I removed and replaced with a 1.5TB drive).

I started the install at 1:52pm and I was looking at my desktop at 2:19pm. This also includes the time it took to completely format the drive since it had Windows 7 64bit on it. I figure that took at least a few minutes so the actual install took about 20 minutes.

I even got it to play AVI, WMV and MP3 files right off the bat. It’s a simple download to get the codecs.

I forgot that I could use Virtualbox to install a virtual copy of Windows or use WINE to try and run some apps for those times when I would need them. I’m not quite ready to make the switch, but if this test bed works out Windows may be off this machine sooner rather than later.