I finally got around to setting up my desktop computer last weekend (I’ve just been using my laptop until now). While I was at it, I decided to go ahead and remove the hard drive that was going bad, and then I got the wild hair up my ass to install Ubuntu Linux (a popular distribution of Linux that actually has a nice user community that answers questions, and is built with ease-of-use in mind).

I downloaded the Live CD, and tried to rearrange one of my hard drives to make room for Linux there. The disk partition editor (GPartEd) froze up in the middle of resizing the old partition… so I rebooted, only to find that it actually did that successfully (regardless of freezing up). Then I tried to format the new area to the Linux file system type… and again, it froze up but seemed to have successfully done it anyway.

From this point, I clicked the option to install, and things went surprisingly smoothly. Ubuntu even has a neat little function that can import your Windows documents and settings. It installed a boot loader, so the next time I booted up I could choose Linux or Windows (I was halfway afraid that it would just set itself to the default OS and make it a hassle to boot back into Windows).

However, it doesn’t seem to include drivers for my wireless network card. But, Linux does have a utility that can make it use Windows drivers. After following the pleasantly complete and no-brainer-copy-paste instructions from the Ubuntu forums, I got that installed, and the drivers as well.

Linux could now see my wireless card, but it didn’t seem to be able to connect to the wireless network. It also gave no status indicator as to what might have gone wrong. And after playing with the settings a few more times… Linux froze. Linux geeks the world over have constantly ridden Windows for locking up, yet Linux does it too. This was a hardcore lockup, too — keyboard was totally nonresponsive, and I had to power off and back on again.

I haven’t tried messing with it since then, but I shall continue to chronicle my foray into using Linux as my desktop OS, for the (imaginary) people out there who might be interested to hear the tale.