Friday 23 October 2009

Ubuntu’ing another laptop!!!

Oh, bless!

I’ve just had found out that an old friend — Sean, of Tyche’s Games — has just had a mention on a local college news site.

Good for him, I think!

Sean has been in the industry — as either a retailer, writer, or gamer — for a long time, and I’m thinking it’s nice to see he, and Tyche’s Games, getting a mention outside of it.

•••••

Phew!

There’s something else, as well …

As you might have noticed, I’ve gone and installed Ubuntu 9.04, on someone else’s laptop!

Now, I’ve had an old friend, Kevin, who’s found Windoze XP to be less than satisfying. It’s something he, personally, has found rather tricky to navigate around.

So, when I suggested, this morning, that he back up the few files on his system, and make the switch, he was happy to go along with it …

Now this is something of a try out for both of us; Kevin, bless him, is a touch older than most of my friends.

As such, he finds Windoze XP a fiddly OS to work his way around. So we’re both gambling that he’ll find Ubuntu 9.04 easier to use.

Mind you, I say that, I’m more familiar with both Ubuntu and OS X than I am, Windoze; but at least I know where to go to find something on an Ubuntu system.

When it actually came to installing it, for example, I asked a dozen of so different friends which function key, to hold down, to force a pc to boot from a CD.

And got five different answers …

It doesn’t help that Kevin’s laptop had something of an iffy CD drive.

Don’t ask.

Just don’t even ask!

No, seriously, don’t … !

But once I’d got that sorted — mostly by making sure the cd tray was pushed in, really firmly — we managed to get Ubuntu 9.04 up and running, within the space of about twenty minutes!

And, whether this is because Canonical’s been adding all sorts of stuff to the mix, in preparation for the Karmic Koala release, next week, or as part of the updates Tim mentioned here, a couple of days ago, I am very aware that I’ve not — as yet — needed to install Java or Javascript.

Adobe Flash Player, I did.

And that went rather zippily, I must confess!

To the point where I was even able to do a brief ‘Read Me’ file, to explain how to get to his files — which are in Home>Documents — and a few basic games that Ubuntu’s come with for years!!

As and when he manages to give me some feed back, I’ll let you all know more!


2 comments:

Tim said...

pj.

i had the same when i reinstalled the other day, i had to manualy install flash but as u say that was easy the java things were all on udate list....

has kevin used umbefump b4? he will find it so much easier than windoze i think....

wish him luck

Tim

Nik Nak said...

Well, it’d be a first, for him … I’m gonna try and put a ‘Read Me’ file together, so at least he can use OpenOffice out of the box.