Ubuntu to you too or me in this case.

With a focus on Open Source tools while working on Operations Management skills (or the more popular term seems to be Operations Research) I needed to get a machine on an Open Source OS. A various times in the past I have had both physical and virtual machines running Linuxes such as Debian, Red Hat, CentOS, Gentoo and BSDs such FreeBSD (which I really like, but that's a post for another time) and OpenBSD.

Last weekend I decided to try Ubuntu Linux 9.04. Since it is based on Debian I figured it can't be too different. The only sense of difference was when it came to the GUI, it would take me a few tries to get x-window working properly. On Ubuntu it was simple, simple simple. The only thing that took a little bit of thinking was applying the wireless driver. The wireless card (on an old laptop) I used only had Windows drivers. So I got to try the famous Linux NDIS wrappers to run Windows drivers on the Linux OS. Of course since the network was not enabled yet, I had to download the .deb package files, burn them to CD, then mount the CD. Since a command line is not immediately available in Ubuntu by default, running dkpg or apt-get was not an option to install the local .deb files for NDIS. But I found that if I right click the .deb file, "GDebi Package Installer" will install the .deb file (yes I was clued in enough to know to check http://packages.ubuntu.com/ for dependencies first and download them). So once NDIS wrappers was installed, I ran it against the Windows drivers, then entered the wireless info and the rest is wireless network success.

I have heard good things about Ubuntu for awhile. Now that I have installed it, I am impressed with it as a easy to install laptop Linux. I plan to install Operations Research tools on Ubuntu laptop to expand my skills. Do you have any success stories with Ubuntu?