Hugging the Hedgehog
Partly to broaden my computing horizons, partly as an exercise in exploring new things to write about professionally, and partly to fill the hours of an otherwise dull Friday evening, I thought it might be fun to install Ubuntu 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog on my aging iBook.
This machine runs OS X Tiger acceptably, but there's a lot of slowness and disk-grinding to put up with. It's an early model white dual-USB iBook with 600MHz G3 processor, 20GB hard disk, and 640MB RAM. I installed Ubuntu from one of their nicely packaged disks ordered from the web site. I had previously tried downloading a .iso and burning my own disk, but for some reason it didn't work.
I took some notes as I went along. These are, of course, just the notes from one evening's noodling. There's likely to be more notes as more evenings present themselves, and more noodles are partaken.
Things I didn't expect to work, but they do
- installing and running in the first place. This is hardly an up-to-date machine, but Hoary Hedgehog seems to be running very happily. It seems fast enough for daily use (but let me try using it for a few days before I conclude further on that)
- customisable toolbars
- auto software updates
- USB mouse and scrollwheel (this is a really old mouse that's been lurking in the cupboard for years, too)
Things I am very impressed by
- 'apt-get install epiphany-browser' ... zap! A new browser installed, and an alias to it inserted in the Applications menu without me looking. Smart.
- themes and design. It all looks nice; not pretty-pretty like OS X, but still nice. I like the tendency towards minimalism.
Things that I did expect to work, but they don't
- control-clicking instead of right-clicking (eventually I added a mouse and found things much easier)
- Online documentation in the Ubuntu wiki - almost everything I search for doesn't exist
Mysteries
- where's the hash key? In fact, where's a bunch of special characters? (Some time later: hmmm, found hash at least. And some others. Some serious keymapping required for long-term use, though.)
- how do I put the machine to sleep? (Some more time later: looks like the post from areitze on this page offers a solution to this problem.) (Even later still: Yes! It works.)
- key command variability. To quit some apps, it's Control+Q. Others, it's Alt+F4, or Control+W. Annoying.
Things I really miss from OS X
- Quicksilver
- Command keys
- Expose
- Markdown
- TextEdit, rather to my surprise
- BBC Radio Player working
- A simple online software repository, along the lines of Hyperjeff
I have no doubt there exist Gnome alternatives to all of these. I just haven't had the chance to find them yet.
Labels: tech
