Devil's Advocate

Salvation at last. From Microsoft Windows. From the legend that Vista is because it decided to hang, perpetually. RIP. Period.

I'm not much of a geek or a nerd but I am a fan of speed, of performance, of visual pleasantries. XP was fast but was a laggard when it came to graphics. Buying a Mac would require me to rob a bank. Vista tried (very hard) but failed miserably on the performance and graphics front. Then you had all those viruses and worms and trojans and what not. Then you had a piece of software called the antivirus which according to me is the biggest virus 'cos it hogs 1/3rd of your system's memory. Plus Microsoft considers you, the user so very dumb that it decided to hide as many system tools from you as possible. Then you have all those 3rd party apps which cost you a bomb. Combine all this and you have an ecosystem which perhaps aims at world domination (are you listening Google guys?)!!! No more.

Frustrated from all this and having an appetite for a little bit of experimentation, I set out on the road less travelled. I typed the magical link (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download), and put the Ubuntu torrent on download. It took a painful four and a half long hours for the Ubuntu iso to download (thanks to the BSNL Broadband), but after that everything happened in a jiffy. Got the MD5 checksum done. The Ubuntu guys even suggested an open source image burning software which burned the iso pretty quickly.

But before we go ahead, its a good idea to have multiple partitions on your HDD and your data backup. Boot your system from the Ubuntu CD and select 'Try Ubuntu without making changes to your system'. See whether its playing the sounds, displaying the graphics and connecting to the net. If any of the them don't work, you'll probably need a driver for it.

Reboot.

Installation is guided!!! Select the 'Install Ubuntu' option this time. It takes seven steps to install. The trickiest part is the disk partitioning. Select the guided partitioning (the third option). Give 4 gigs to linux swap, as much as you want to filesystem (selecting ext3) and giving '/' to mount point.

Wallah. You have your Ubuntu ready to be installed. It took my system 20 mins flat to install Ubuntu. Pretty fast!!! Updates take upto an hour to install depending upon your net connection speed. But the results are pleasing. You have a system that's nifty, visually pleasing, no viruses, highly customizable, all the basic applications and complete support @ http://ubuntuforums.org/.

What else does a man (or a woman for that matter) need.

In a world with Linux, we don't need windows and gates!!!