You know, my life is busy enought with “normal” activities without the random emergencies that keep popping up.
Somehow, my wife managed to get the SurfSidekick installed on her computer. ‘Tis an annoying piece of software that causes random advertisements to load up one’s browser, no matter what you happen to be doing. I ran Ad-Aware and Windows Defender on the system, but no matter what I did, the software kept resuscitating itself. Finally, I told my wife to save every important file she had to my file server, and I wiped out her system.
Not wanting to have to go through that pain again, I tried installing one of the newer upstart Linux distributions, Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based on the Debian distribution, which, though I’ve never used it, I’ve heard very good things about. I downloaded the torrent and burned it onto DVD. Then I loaded it up.
It loaded up very clean, and only one error showed up after it was installed. Unfortunately, this error was that the computer couldn’t connect to the Internet. My wireless card didn’t work. No problem… fired up Google and found out that the prism2 drivers just need to be initialized before they’ll work. There is an entire support group working towards getting wireless cards to work in Linux, which is a huge challenge since many wireless manufactures refuse to release Linux drivers.
Anyway, once the system was up and the networking was working, the system works great. Easy point-and-click interface to all the functionality you’ll need to configure, like networking, printers, etc. If you’ve been ready to throw your windows box out the window, or if you’ve got an older computer that doesn’t run well with the newer versions of Windows, I’d recommend trying out Ubuntu…
6 responses to “Ubuntu Rules”
Transmission:
This adware program must be manually installed.
Yeah… I tell my wife that and she denies doing it. Rather than argue, I explained that since she denies doing it, the alternative is that it installed itself, and I refuse to have a computer in the house that installing random applications.
And she doesn’t believe in magic, so she can’t use that as the reason.
You know, Mark, I do read my own blog.
It was a virus sent through my brother Sam’s AIM.
He was sending me a bunch of photo and information links for his band, and one of them said, “check out our photos here” so I clicked on it and *BOOM*. Within seconds, the html link switched to downloading an executable.
He typed (like 5mins later) “oh yeah, don’t click that last link I sent… my computer has a virus and it uses AIM to send out links with viruses and spyware…”
I do like Ubuntu, though. Would highly recommend.
Don’t ya think it’s from all the porn that you look at??? That’s how you get those trojan’s on your computer that send links through AIM!!!
Hmm… need to start checking my wife’s bookmarks and logs. Act ually, I really don’t care anymore, since as long as her system is safe (which it is) she can do whatever she wants in her free time.