R i g h t a r d i a: Linux saves the day again

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Linux saves the day again

In the latest home catastrophe my son's PC started acting badly. At first it wouldn't boot and then the video card started wigging out. My son became agitated and suggested he needed a new motherboard and CPU. I tried to reload Windows XP Pro, but it wouldn't load

My son swapped out both the monitor and the ATI video card. I also looked in the BIOS and made sure it was set up for an AGP card, I also lowered the AGP aperture from 64MB to 32 MB.

I suggested that we blow the Operating System (OS) away and install Ubuntu Linux 9.04. I told my son that I had no interest in spending one dime on buying XP Pro or Vista because Ubuntu Linux was free.

After making the BIOS change to the AGP aperture, Ubuntu Linux loaded and started installing the OS. It rebooted after about 20 minutes or less. I used Upgrade Manager to download and install more than 200 updates.

Rock and roll! The dead system was revived. My son hooked up the original monitor and it worked perfectly after I adjusted the video resolution and the screen size.

I showed my son some of the basics of navigating Linux and he had little problem moving around the new Graphical User Interface.

He wondered if it would be possible to make Ubuntu Linux look like XP Pro. In fact he found a script called XPGnome that can do it. It takes about five minutes to download and run the script and there is a handy video on a Ubuntu web site that shows you how to install it. I helped my son install the script and he is as happy as can be.

He also noticed that his PC boots up much faster and his You Tube videos load and run without the choppiness of XP Pro,

I told him he will no longer have to defrag his hard drive or run other XP Pro utilities when the OS slows to a crawl. I promised to install a free anitvirus (ClamAV) and firewall front end program (ClamTK) for him. I also showed him that Linux includes a movie and music player and has Bit Torrent for downloads. So far his only disappointment is AOL AIM Instant messenger. I am still working on getting AIM to work. He didn't like the Pidgin IM that comes with Linux.

I'm certain you could fool grandma or your wife with XPGnome. It might be the way to introduce them to Linux. My wife has been using Linux for months now, but I didn't have to install XPGnome to get her to use it.