Home » Archives » March 2007 » De-Microsoftication

Well after finally getting fed up with the grindingly slow performance of my four year old install of Windows XP, this post is brought to you by a shiny new installation of Ubuntu Linux.

I've been toying with changing this machine over for quite a while now, but been put off by the amount of legacy information (photos, documents, emails, etc) that had accumulated on the machine and which I could not afford to lose. So I decided to play it safe by buying a brand new hard disk (160GB Western Digital, about £35 from www.dabs.com). This would allow me to install Ubuntu on a fresh system, and still be able to swap disks back and get at my XP install if I really had to.

With the hardware changes done, I fired the machine back up with the Ubuntu 6.10 live CD. All ran well, with no problems detecting any hardware or the internet connection, so I hit the 'Install' button. The Ubuntu graphical installer was suitably simple, and I was happy to let it make its own decisions on partitioning, etc. A single reboot at the end and it was all up and running.
The next task was getting my email back up and running. I had been using Thunderbird under WinXP and in an uncharacteristic feat of preparation, had backed up mine and Sarah's mail files to CD before taking the old hard drive out. Ubuntu comes with Evolution Mail installed as standard, and I thought I'd give it a try. However it didn't seem too keen to import my Thunderbird mail file, so I took the path of least resistance and installed Thunderbird instead. Now it was just a case of copying the backup version over the mail file in the new installation, firing up Thunderbird, and there was all my old emails. Fantastic. I did have a bit of trial and error remembering passwords for some of my mail accounts though! Creating a login account for Sarah and importing her emails into Thunderbird was similarly easy.

This morning, I had to face the question of getting at all the information on the old Windows hard drive. Handily, this isn't the only machine we've got, so I dropped it into Sarah's XP machine as a second drive. At the very least it meant I could get at it from that machine, but I was pleasantly surprised that after sharing the entire drive I was able to get at it in about 4-5 clicks from Ubuntu. Bear in mind here that I had no end of trouble getting XP to access shared files on my housemates machines when I was at uni, its nice that things just work. So now various things are flying across the wireless connection to their new home.

Ubuntu make a bit thing of being "Linux for human beings" and how stuff "Just Works". So far it lives up to the promises.