I installed Ubuntu on my laptop a while ago, but didn’t use my laptop a lot because I had a computer that was about 30 times as fast (P3 Mobile vs. Core 2 Duo). But when I’m not at home, thus not at my computer, I only have my laptop! And since I’m far far away from home now for my study… I got to know Ubuntu a bit more.

I must say my first few Linux tryouts were.. bad. First try was Fedora Core 3 which was.. nasty. The 14 year old me didn’t know what packages to get and what not to get, let alone the proper size for a swap partition.

Years later I installed Ubuntu 8, first having tried some setups in a virtual environment. I liked it, and figured I could get used to the nice “Add/Remove…” option in Applications. But my music! The sound sucked. So I tried installing drivers for my Realtek’97, I think. Installed the driver (I guess), rebooted, tried to log in.. Which failed. I cursed Ubuntu for not letting me log in with a faulty sound driver and promptly reinstalled Windows.

So, now, Ubuntu 9, Jaunty Jackalope… I like! So much liked it on my laptop that I also installed it on my home PC (the fast one) and I liked it even more. It even basically auto-installed my videocard driver (asked me what version I wanted)! Windows doesn’t do that, hehe. Windows 7 does I think, but still, +1 for Ubuntu.

There were 2 obstacles:

• Flash on x64
• Surround Sound

Flash was a bit of googling to do. I heard people on Windows x64 had the same problems so… Nothing to mourn about. Just a bit weird that the Adobe site didn’t offer a lot of help for x64 (not on the download page anyway). In the end I found the alpha x64 version and it works like a charm… nah not really. Firefox crashes when I play any game on Kongregate. But it’s Alpha and it’ll be fine when the first RC comes around.

Surround sound took me some googling but I figured it out. You need to add the “Surround” and some other sliders to the Volume Control and then you’re done! Man that was easy. Ubuntu took away the driver installing troubles: video and sound. Pretty neat. Now my computer even uses the subwoofer with Youtube vids, something I can’t get to work in Windows. So again +1.

Enough Ubuntu praise for today. Now go get your copy.