I was speaking to good friend the other day and he was surprised to learn that I use Linux instead of Microsoft Windows. Given that he is doing some IT training at the moment it is a bit of a shame as he didn’t appear to regard Linux as viable alternative.
I have been using various flavours (distributions/distros) of Linux since about 2003. These have included Novell’s Suse and the Redhat sponsored Fedora.
If you are new to Linux you could think of the flavours of Linux as different versions of the Microsoft operating system – e.g. 98, ME, 2000, XP but that isn’t correct because each of those is an upgrade to the previous. It is better to think of a Linux distribution as an operating system in its own right, and it could replace whatever version of windows you currently have installed.
Anyway, enough of that – the point of this entry was to tell about a recent upgrade which I did.
For the last 6 months I have been using Ubuntu version 7.04 which was codenamed Feisty Fawn. It was the most user friendly o/s I had ever used. Well last night I fired up Ubuntu’s version of Windows Update and it told me that version 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon was available. Upgrading your entire o/s is generally risky, however I decided to give it a go and I’m glad I did – it went perfectly.
The files which needed to upgrade were downloaded in about an hour (1.6GB) and the upgrade itself took a further hour. But it just worked, I am quite amazed. Can you imagine upgrading XP to vista over the Internet and it not costing you a penny? No… neither can I!
So, thanks to the efforts of volunteers across the globe I have a totally free operating system that has all the shiny aspects of Vista installed over and evening without having to lose any my files. Great!
