I just lost my drain of thought

The nerd within wants to tell you that she loves Ubuntu and all the free-ness it entails. For those who don’t know what it is (I only heard about it recently from my tech savvy sis), Ubuntu is an operating system based on Linux. The only problems I have had are setting up my wireless network adapter, a super slow startup, and a misleading “hibernation.” After quite a while of trying to install the drivers for my wireless, it worked and I felt all good about myself because I had to type commands in Terminal, though I’m not quite geeky enough to understand what I’m typing when doing so. Unfortunately, I must’ve commanded it to work only temporarily or I was typing such ridiculous commands that Ubuntu just felt sorry enough for me to let me online for a little bit to make me feel better, because it has decided not to work anymore. What a tease. I don’t want to work on it at the moment, because I have to write my Chinese paper, and also, I don’t really feel like sitting super close to our router due to my ethernet cable’s debilitating shortness.

As for my slow startup, it was just because I hadn’t defragged my hard drive after installing Ubuntu. It was seriously taking up to like 30 minutes and I was reconsidering using Ubuntu because of that. But after I defragged today, it ran really fast and I was filled with joy joy joy.

Regarding the false hibernation, I don’t know if it’s because I had to choose not to partition the full 8 gigs for it to run on so they decided to skip out on a few things out of spite, or if they’re still working out some kinks, or something else, but when I tried to put my computer in hibernation mode, it did not quite work that way. The first time I tried, it just put my computer to sleep and then the sign on window came up. The second time I did it, it went blank and didn’t do anything else, and my screen did not even turn off. Hopefully that can be fixed, because I don’t like not being able to hibernate.

I am not claiming nerd street cred by trying to transition over to an alternative operating system; I just really like Ubuntu so far and wanted to write about it, because a lot of the programs on there seem to be better versions of things you’d find on Windows. I haven’t played with a lot of things on there yet, but I got pretty excited when I installed CheckGmail, because I already love Gmail Notifier and CheckGmail is even better, in that it shows a few of your most recent new emails when you hover over the icon in the system tray, for one thing. I am also very satisfied that Ubuntu comes with FreeCell. Eggsellent. And it’s really nice that there’s a pretty big community out there and it’s easy to find help when I need it, as well as the many cool programs. I wouldn’t recommend it to the computer illiterates out there (like my dad, who called me last week freaking out because his screen flipped upside down, maybe more on that later because it was pretty funny), but I would to those who are ready to try something new and want to stick it to the man!

Anyway, there’s a paper that needs to be written with my name on it. Auf Wiedersehen.