Ubuntu Experiment - First Day

Two days ago, I installed Ubuntu Linux 7.10 on my Thinkpad T42 as a secondary OS. Today I had a class and put Ubuntu through a real-world test of surfing, IM, and taking notes.

First thing, it took a few minutes to boot-up. I mean at least 4. Windows takes a bit less than a minute.

I did a quick google search for this problem and the first result was from the official Ubuntu forum. There was a fix and worked: now it’s down to less than a minute.

Running on battery was as quick as on AC, which is good and bad. Good because it’s fast, bad because it seems that my battery lasted less than on Windows. Now, I did have WiFi on and was playing around with the OS so it may have not been an issue. I did get through my 1.5 hour class without it dying but the last few minutes was tense.

Speaking of battery, in the power setting, the lowest time you can set for the screen to automatically turn off with non-use was 11 minutes…11 minutes? I don’t understand. I wanted 1 minute. 

I used OpenOffice Word Processor. Looked pretty polished and, if you’re familiar with Microsoft Word, you’ll be ok. There was one issue though. I had auto spellcheck on (the red squigly) but it was not working. I went into the language settings and it was due to the fact that I had Canadian English selected. I switched to British English and it worked. Otherwise, it worked very well and I was impressed.

This may be an issue only applicable to my campus but to get on the WiFi, I needed a VPN Client provided by the school. Unfortunately, to install it, it needed to be compiled. This meant that I went without WiFi. 

Overall, very impressed. Got some tweaking to do, which I do with Windows anyways so this is not a negative.