Linux on the desktop, your time has come.
Yesterday, as if you didn’t know was the release date of Hardy Heron Ubuntu 8.04, and once the servers cooled down and the torrents where seeded it was pretty easy to get a copy. My son who is 10 was chomping at the bit to upgrade his computer, a trusty old Inspiron 5100. So I decided to let him install without any help from good ol’ dad. Not only did he install it no problems at all, the one glitch he did have was handle with out a hitch as well. To use our wireless network he has an old linksys usb wireless adapter which had never been supported by Ubuntu and to the displeasure of by son 8.04 is no exception. In a move that made this dad as proud as if he ran in the winning touchdown in the championship game, he pulled out the windows driver disk and installed Ndiswrapper and got his beloved computer on the network.
Next my son installed wine, just because he loves scratch it’s a great little programing language but no Linux version (come on MIT you know better than that). It took him all of 25 minutes to go from nothing to programing, all of this without asking me one question.
It sure looks like Linux is ready for the masses, none of this talk about a learning curve, none of this talk about not being able to run applications. It’s ready and it really is up to us to make it happen.
Stumble It!
April 25, 2008 at 11:59 pm
I only wish my experience was the same!
http://www.ogresview.com/archives/641
April 26, 2008 at 9:33 am
Is your sun a genius ?
That’s amazing that a 10 year old kid can do that, but perhaps ubuntu is just even easier then I think.
But yeah, Hardy is very cool indeed
April 27, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Most GNU/Linux distributions are really easy to work with; much easier than Windows. The only problem is that people, after a few years, got used to Windows. You can see this if you change a single icon in someones desktop - you’ll see they will be extremely confused and will not know how to access that application or document.
All I’m saying is: Windows is only for dumb people that don’t know how a system should work and so they think crappy performance, stability and security are normal; and GNU/Linux is for everyone.
April 28, 2008 at 1:40 am
@Bert : Ubuntu IS that easy, even back in 7.04 , when I (being 14 at the time) installed and got my 1st Linux experiance. Personally, I now prefer Gentoo though, where things work only after you install the program/driver manually (a default install doesn’t even give you X).
April 28, 2008 at 12:54 pm
When I was 7 we had this thing called DOS. I could use it nicely and without help from my dad (who doesn’t know anything about computers). Am I a genius? No, you just need to read those fine manuals. =)
April 28, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Some kids play with basketballs, and some with computers. My toy growing up was an Apple IIe. I learned to program BASIC at age 8, and would program my own video games. Of course, back then we didn’t have ROM, just RAM, so I had to copy the programs to pen and paper and retype them in every time I wanted to play them…
…and we had to walk 10 miles to school up hill both ways in the snow. Gosh I feel old…