The Future's Bright...But it's no longer orange...

Ubuntu isn’t as orangey-brown as it used to be. I don’t recall exactly when I last tried to use it, but I didn’t like it much. Yesterday, however, I got it playing ball with my ThinkPad X32.

Just over two years ago I bought myself the ThinkPad X32. I initially installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 on it, and it got upgraded to the latest dev builds, which turned into 2009.06 stable builds. However, when I got it out on Monday, it failed to upgrade to OpenIndiana and was running horribly slow.

The reason I grabbed it out was that my trusty MacBook (of five years now) has a problem…The fan that cools the CPU has died. I noticed this on Monday afternoon, but I’m fairly certain that it had been dead all day - just a testament to how good these machines are, even though they do get quite toasty, they still plod on!

MacBook out of the picture, I take my ThinkPad to work with me. I struggle with OpenSolaris a bit more, then give up and put Ubuntu 10.10 on. It’s a very nice system. I’m not one to advocate Linux and it’s alien commands, but so far, as a general user, I am happy with it. Software installation doesn’t seem quite as straightforward as Apple’s App Store, but it is all very usable.

I especially like the fact that I can use Dropbox with Ubuntu. I rely on Dropbox to keep all of my work document in sync across my two Macs (sometimes my MacBook doesn’t get out of my bag in the evening to do a profile sync).

So, I’d like to raise my glass and say: Well done Canonical and the Ubuntu community, you have impressed me beyond what I thought I’d be.