I took the plunge last night, inspired by my post yesterday, and installed Ubuntu on my linux box I use for chat, email, surfing, and listening to music.

I backed up my Evolution and media files, but I forgot to export my GPG private key. Oops, I’ll have to create a new one and get my new public key posted.

I have to say I was absolutely blown away. First, as a text based installer, so what – everyone wants a GUI installer but there were only a few basic questions asked during installation, and then a few more after that to get it set up. It was, by far, the fastest installation of any linux distribution I’ve ever seen, including Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Suse and Mandrake that I’ve done in the last 5 years. A part of that is that package selection is pre-determined, and looking through the final package list of what’s on the system, I can’t say I disagree with any of them.

I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again – Gnome 2.8 is sexy. I changed Gnome to the Industrial theme right away, I didn’t care for the earth tones of the Ubuntu default theme, nor the fonts, but that’s just personal. Evolution 2.2 wouldn’t import my old Evolution files from my Fedora box. I have ’em backed up, but I hope there wasn’t anything really important there I really need. I did Google for importing, and found a page about importing Evolution email into Thunderbird. Fired up Synaptic, installed Thunderbird, started it, and my box locked up. Hmmm. Restarted, seems to work fine. Still using Evolution at the moment, just from a starting over point, want to try the Junk filters built in now.

Went to change my desktop background, and tried to download a blue Ubuntu background. Firefox locked up. Restarted. Hmm. Wonder if it’s a hardware thing or just me? Seems to be working fine though.

Some of the things that absolutely kick ass. Clean theme, no icons on the desktop. I like splitting the Applications and Computer on the Gnome panel bar thing. Samba functionality worked out of the box. Can completely see my server in the basement and can browse SMB shares. Linked to the shares on my desktop. I never could get that working in Gnome 2.6 / Nautilus on my Fedora Core 2 box.

Synaptic runs like a champ. Being a long time user of Apt from Freshrpms on Fedora & Red Hat, on a Debian based system it even feels better.

Next steps are getting full multimedia functionality, including DVD & MP3; Bluefish and some editor type stuff, and seeing if Rhythmbox can connect over a Samba share. And maybe importing my Evolution stuff.

Then I’ll be on to installing Ubuntu on the laptop and the Athlon 64! And if I’m really daring, wiping my Gaming box. Getting closer everyday.