Don't worry, you can trust me. I'm not like the others.

Banned In China

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Ubuntu?


A crush of work, worry about my office mate, a general feeling of malaise and my normal sloth have prevented me from writing much recently. Many things have caught my eye including the report from that well known reporter, Anonymous concerning the apparent belief by the congressional democrats that the only reason they lost was that the people just didn't know how much they had indeed done and that they just couldn't get their message out there. And that because and therefore they got their asses handed them on a platter.

I have worked with people who were in an active stage of an incapacitating delusional mental illness, and they were not, I believe, as delusional as that. There are certain things believed or statements made by a person which I normally feel I cannot respond to because the statement made or belief held is so far from an even fleeting brush with reality that that person does not exist in the real world and that without entering that (kind of) parallel universe: A democratic senator thinking that they have performed admirably in the last two years and the only reason they lost was because they didn't explain it well enough to me; is just one of those things. (Some one arguing that the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Yeman are necessary for our nation's safety is another. The continuing war on the use of marijuana is another, at least when some one insists that marijuana is a dangerous drug.) I suppose these later two things can be justified because they help the powerful get and maintain control over the hoi poli. Not, however for the reasons put out there.

But a democratic politician thinking that his party lost because they were unable to explain their governing brilliance to the electorate is a level of delusion that is simply breath taking. It evidences an ignorance that is just well, special.

Now one other reason I haven't been writing much and the cause of the title of this little piece is that I have been coming home at night and attempting to install Ubuntu on to one of my older computers to see how I would like it. It is I am told no problem at all, but I cannot get it done and now I am in a quest mode sort of like Arthur or Chevy Chase in National Lampoon's Vacation, if you will.

Curse you Bill Gates. (Incidentally this is being written on a version of Linux called Xandros if you are interested.

UPDATE: My wife points out that perhaps I should have used the Google and typed in say: "Installing Ubuntu on an older computer." But I think that that would have been cheating don't you?

1 comment:

Cujo359 said...

I think if you avoid getting information from the Internet, then you are missing one of the main benefits of open source software. Support for it lives on the web, in the experiences of the people who use it and make it. For Ubuntu, the forums are a great place to start looking.

I have 10.04 (the latest long term service (LTS) version) running on an old 3.0 GHz P4. The only outlandish resource it has is 2GB of RAM. If you have less than 1GB, things might not go so swimmingly with regular Ubuntu. There's a lightweight version, though, that may work better.