In which we're following the experience of HM's techical director Tim Hatton using Ubuntu for web design... if he can get past playing with the display settings and not downloading games.

Installing Ubuntu

Getting home with the dead machine, I realise that I've left the Ubuntu CD in the office.  I find a blank CD and download the Ubuntu 8.04 (did I mention I like playing with shiny new things?) ISO image so I can make a new live CD.  This takes a while thanks to my broadband providers idiotic traffic shaping which halves my download speed after about 10 minutes.  Thanks.  Why reduce the download speed of people who need it, and let people who are looking at Facebook all day have super speedy connections which they wouldn't notice the drop on?  Anyway I digress.

By 8.45pm I have a live CD.  I pull out the dead HD and put in a new one, pausing for 15 minutes to try and work out why the machine won't see the new HD and eventually find the jumpers have been set incorrectly.  The computer boots from the CD and I run the option to "Check CD for defects" which sounds pretty worthwhile given I found the blank CD on a bookshelf.

I start the install at about 9.30pm.  The install goes pretty smoothly - it takes me through international settings and nothing goes wrong.  It is pretty gibberishy whilst doing the install (but I suppose most OSes are when doing a new install) and eventually it completes around 10.15pm.  It didn't complain about any device drivers, but my machine is a few years old and doesn't have anything too outlandish in it.  I log in and Ubuntu tells me there are many, many updates to download.  I decide to let it do whatever it needs to do overnight and I'll look at it again tomorrow.

Getting started

The next day I shift the computer out of the lounge into the garden office.

First impressions of Ubuntu are good.  The design is a bit clunky (it feels a bit like using Duplo after the Lego of Aero or MacOS X interfaces - again doubtless there's some lovely new skin or something I can put on it but I haven't found it yet).  This isn't helped by me working on an old 15" screen which only goes up to 1024 x 768 resolution.  I also find Ubuntu's way of calling their operating systems "Wally Wombat" or "Peeved Penguin" a bit daft but there you go.  But overall it seems great - feels very solid (as I'd expected), nice and fast start up, hasn't complained about anything yet.

Preinstalled apps are Firefox 3 (great), Open Office (no problems there) and something called Evolution mail.  This is one area where I'd been a bit suspect of open source  offerings - a decent email/calendar/contact/etc. manager.  Say what you like about Microsoft, but Outlook is pretty damn irreplacable on a day to day basis for me.  But Evolution mail seems to do a bunch of stuff - calendar etc.  People in the office using Outlook send me meeting requests which it handles happily.

Reading around a bit I start to get to grips with the "Add new program" install function which runs off and gives you a list of loads of stuff you can install.  So no command line "sudo apt get" doodah, which makes it a bit friendlier.  I'm starting to think even my Dad could get to grips with this...  Despite having a degree in computing, worked in IT for 15 years and owned every computer system going I still find some of the messages in the Ubuntu online help forums a bit baffling.  Suppose I could read a manual (if there is one), but that's entirely against my religion.

Naturally before trying to find some web design software, which is what I'm supposed to be doing, I go to see what games are available.  I eventually track down an open source version of my old fave Civilisation (Free Civ) which I then "test" for a couple of hours.