This is a techie post, so sorry to bore non IT people  

Having a little time on my hands at the moment, I have started to experiment with Ubuntu. The latest version 9.04 was released a few days ago. My initial attempts of getting it to dual boot with vista and resetting back to the vista boot program ended in disaster. But after a few google searches came up with what I was doing wrong.  

Now I have my laptop with both Ubuntu 64 bit and Vista Ultimate 32 bit running side by side. Inital view of Ubuntu is very good, it picked up all my drivers for the laptop, and it is running very smooth and fast. Of course, as an IT person, was never just happy with the out of the box version, so started looking into what I could add on. Checking to get my mp3’s to play and my divx files. Ubuntu does not ship with default with some of these add ons due it seems to licence restrictions, in the sence that the main build always must be fully open source code. But it is easy to add them on , thanks to the software updater, it will go and find the packages for you and let you install them. All worked first time so was very happy with that. 

I then did a little more searching to see could I make Ubuntu do all the nice fancy graphic like shaking windows and the cube interface for multiples screens. Tried to turn it on, but no joy, this was due to me using an ATI graphics card, and for this, you need to download drivers directly from ATI/AMD. Now this is where things moved away from the nice interface and searching to a command line option. But again online help was great , got the command and away it went getting all the files. Once installed, it added the options to the menu and was able to active the new drivers.  OK, so now I had the graphics card sorted, then found out I needed another appliction to be installed, again from the command line, once again Ubuntu went away downloaded and installed it. Finally I was set to mess about with the fancy graphics. It works nice and smooth and while it is a little of a nice to have, it was good to mess about for a while.

Doing a little more reseach I came across Ubuntu Studio, this is a version of Ubuntu that focus on media/sound/graphics. I guess in a way like the Mac does this very well. There is two options, you can install it as the default install, or you can use the command line from ubuntu to add it, I took this option. What you get is a nice graphical version of Ubuntu, which seems faster, for video playback. I gues sthey have tweked the code base to be fully optimised for this. It takes Ubuntu to the same graphical level of the new Mac OS x and Vista/Win 7.  I think I will leave this in place.  

So from my inital day of messing around, I have come to the following conclusion, Ubuntu has improved greatly, and it sets up things nice and easy. For any general extras the add on manager works very well, pickes up if drivers exist and installed them. Then if you like to get a little more under the hood, you can, and install and configure via the command line.  I am now using Ubuntu to see how it will go. It may be something I will come across in my volunteer work. In a funny way it was nice to get back to my Unix days, where one can easily configure everything and it just does what you want, rather than with Vista where is tries to be smart and does what it thinks you want. The operating system designed by IT people V the operating system designed by business people.