HM's technical director, Tim Hatton, had a computer blow up last week - so he's installed Ubuntu on it and is going to be blogging here on his experience with it.  He just likes playing with new things, really...

=========

So my computer is dead.  It is an ex-computer.  The computer I started my web design business (www.timhatton.com) with several years ago with is no more.  I weep for its silicon soul.

Ahem.

Actually, it's just the hard drive that's gone.  Started making a funny clicking noise, which is never very good, and in this case seems a few minutes later to have been terminal.

Truth be told, it was a back-up machine now anyway, relegated behind the ranks of dual-core, shiny new beasts which occupy the space under the desks.  But it'd be remiss and wasteful of me to just chuck it out, as it's a perfectly good office machine.  Having a spare hard drive, I decide to reinstall XP and MS Office back on it to get it back up to scratch.

But, would you know it, I can't find an XP set up disc anywhere.  In the course of my search for it I did find the set up discs for Win 95, Win 98, Win Me (shudders at the memory of it...), Mac OS 9, Mac OS X and Ubuntu.

Hmm.  Ubuntu.  Hmm.  I've played with it a bit but never really used it.  I know there's some command line stuff, but, hey, I'm 36 and have been using computers for a long time - I'm not scared by the command line.

My father-in-law, Alan, is a huge open source fan and left me this live CD for Ubuntu 6 a while ago.  I've run it as a live CD to have a play with it.  I can see the arguments for open source OS and software, it's just I can never see it gaining mass home appeal whilst it's still not "friendly" enough for my Dad to use.  We toyed with the idea of installing it in the office, but I know MS for all it's faults and can fix pretty much any problem which comes up.  I'm sure Linux fans will tell me I'm wrong and that nothing ever goes wrong and it's lovely and friendly etc. but that's my opinion.  Anyway, I'm trying it now so let's see how it goes.

I've also never really considered Ubuntu for doing web design for one main reason: Dreamweaver.  I love Dreamweaver.  Keeps all my websites in check, love the code view in it, don't even mind that it hasn't really changed in the last 4 iterations which Macromedia/Adobe keep flogging us ("Look! Shiny new Ajax thingies! Come on, pay up!") 

But I hear good things about Nvu / Komposer, and maybe I can test those out.

Financially I can see it makes sense too.  Vista's, what, £150 or so?  MS Office another £200?  CS3 is pushing over £1000?  Maybe I'm not going to get some of the functionality of these software packages by using open source, but I'm going to have some beer money...

So I'm going to give Ubuntu a whirl and see what it's like from a web designers point of view.  Stay tuned!