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October 27, 2007
Ubuntu
After years of running straight Debian on my desktop without features such as sound or a working mouse scroll-wheel, I decided to give Ubuntu a try.
Ubuntu is based on Debian. In practical terms this means that nearly everything I learned running Debian still applies.
One cool feature of Ubuntu is the distribution of a so-called LiveDisk. This is a CD image you can download, burn onto disk, and use to start your computer. All you need to do is set your computer to boot from the CDROM drive, throw in the Ubuntu disk, and fire it up. For me, everything (sound, peripherals, etc) has worked well on several different computers, both desk, and laptop.
Getting everything working perfectly, though, has taken a bit of time. Most of that time has been spent searching through forums, looking for instructions to fix my particular problems. This is always hairy business because most of these errors have their own jargon. If you know the jargon, it's trivial to find solutions to the problems, but if you don't, it's hard to find what you're looking for.
I'm making a new category of this blog called Jargobuntu to post solutions to my problems along with both "official" jargon and my original search terms. Hopefully, this will allow a person or two to save the effort I've already made.
First entry follows.
Posted by james at October 27, 2007 09:20 AM