[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

[Gavin Stevens]

Hi all,

Finally got round to installing Ubuntu.

The installation was very quick - no more than 20 minutes from inserting 
the CD to showing the Gnome desktop in mud brown.

It's still something of a strange world to me, a long term Icewm & dfm 
devotee. However, I've got my internet connection back, although I 
finished up using pppconfig rather than wvdial. My trusty wvdial didn't 
want to play for some reason, it kept going on about /dev/modem, but was 
no happier when I added that link (I've done this several times before & 
thought I knew what I was doing). pppconfig, by contrast, ran smoothly & 
the pon command made my modem spring into life.

I'm going to try Ubuntu for a while & see if it really is a good distro 
for non-techie users.

One thing I've noticed is that it has no software whatsoever that will 
do anything with mp3 files. I truly admire this spirited stand against a 
non-free format, but I have 30 CDs worth (as wave files) of mp3s, so I 
think a visit to the Audacity website is on the cards.

The hardest thing right now is not having Sylpheed, my top favourite 
e-mail client of all time. Evolution annoyed me within about a minute 
because it wanted to get all of my e-mails from all accounts in one go. 
So I'm stuck with Mozilla Thunderbird for now, which has the old 
Netscrape rubbish set up where it allows multiple pop servers but only 
one smtp server.

Apart from these teething troubles, it seems good.

Gavin.