Ubuntu

Ubuntu? Maybe they should consider renaming it to Ubiquntu. (as in, "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone that's using it.")

I've tried Ubuntu off and on over the past year, downloading the Live CD and test driving it on X86 and PPC. It had a very polished desktop and package of applications, but there were always these minor issues (i.e. unsupported model of wireless, or having to backup my hard drive and repartition in order to turn my laptop into a dual booting Xp/Ubuntu laptop, etc.) that kept me from making any long term use of it.

Well, this weekend, due to a combination of two factors, I've decided to give Ubuntu a longer trial period.

One: Thanks to a wonderful little installer/hack called Wubi, I was able to install Ubuntu as a boot up option without the inconvenience of backing up, repartioning and restoring my Windows hard drive. It basically creates a linux partition inside of a large file (4 or 5 GB) on the Windows partition. Very slick. I don't know why this tool hasn't gotten more buzz than it has, because I think it's pure genius.

Two: Although Ubuntu uses 2.6.x kernel, it still didn't seem to find the Dell TrueMobile 1350/Broadcom chipset WiFi card quite correctly enough to give me wireless functionality. Fortunately, uber-geek David Watson had the same problem last May and was thoughtful enough to post his solution for anyone else who might come along with the same problem in the future. Once I followed those directions, my wireless card sprung to life and started working flawlessly (including, I might add, support for WPA2 on my home access point).

For sheer ease of use out of the box, I think Puppy is still the distribution to beat . . . but Ubuntu offers a heck of a lot without the child's bike/training wheels feeling that I get from Puppy.

Puppy Linux . . . Wow!

Okay, I've spent several days wrestling with Damn Small Linux. It's a very cool distribution, but unfortunately, I could not get the wireless card in my laptop to work with it. It's one of those Broadcom chipset based wireless cards, unfortunately, and Broadcom never saw fit to release their specifications with the Linux community.

I even tried using NDISWrapper to get Linux to trick out the Windows drivers, but that didn't work either. It is entirely possible, of course, that I did it incorrectly since I'm pretty much a total noob at this.

I wound up finding out that there was a reverse engineered driver for the Dell 1350/Broadcom wireless, but it was integrated in with version 2.6 of the Linux Kernel, and DSL was still using the old 2.4 kernel. So, either I had to find a way to hack the DSL kernel on my bootable USB drive (yeah, good luck with that, noob!) or switch to a distribution that used the newer 2.6 kernel instead.

So, I went back through my list of live CD distros and found . . . Puppy Linux. I know, what's up with the name? The Linux mascot is supposed to be a penguin, not a puppy. Still, it sounded promising based on everything that I had read, plus it had the 2.6 kernel in it, so it should support my wireless card.

I had to burn the .iso file to a CD in order to create the bootable USB key, but I have got to say that this Puppy Linux distro has been amazing. I sort of suspect it's Linux with big old training wheels on it, but I was able to download it, get it installed on my USB key, booting my computer, etc. and all the network related stuff (find and activate the wireless card, use WPA2 to get on my locked down network) in less than an hour. Oh, yeah-- and Puppy has a mechanism that lets you save the state of your session across reboots.

It looks like, for the time being at least, that Puppy Linux is the (don't say it, don't say it) . . . top dog.