I tried to set up a Ubuntu box about a year ago and became frustrated with the experience very easily. I don’t know if it was just the difficulty of switching from a Windows mindset or if the software has really progressed that much in just the last year or so. But Its actually pretty easy now to set up a computer with older hardware that can do pretty much anything my XP laptop can do.

In about 2 hours I had done the following.

1. Installed Ubunto 8.04 from a cd (including formatting the 60gb drive)

2. Added 3 external usb drives (2 formatted NTFS and one a Mac Drive formatted HFS+)

3. Configured the built in FTP server to allow access to all the drives from outside the network.

4. Configured SAMBA shares for the computer for Windows networking.

I remember back in college spending hours just trying to get network access from Charlie’s Windows 2000 box to my XP box across the hall. I do have to admit that I have a little bit more experience than the average user, but since I have almost no Linux or UNIX experience I’m basically coming at it fresh. It’s been great so far!

I’m ready to call Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) ready for prime time*

Later!

*but not quite ready for mom’s and grandparents to use… unless you lock down all the settings.