I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1525 Notebook back in February because I needed a mobile machine for my school work. The thought was that if I could take my laptop with me anywhere, I could improve my school productivity. For the most part, being able to read my school text in a vehicle or write a term paper at the park while the kids are playing has been a huge success. One of the most important benefits for me, however, came when my Microsoft Operating System crashed.
After downloading one of the many required updates for Microsoft, my computer suddenly decided to freeze and stop working. I try to understand how computers work and have been somewhat successful in fixing minor bugs, but an OS crash was something I thought was beyond me. I couldn't get the OS to load and because I wasn't home, I couldn't simply insert a back-up boot disc. I asked a few computer-savvy friends at work and the suggestion that I switch to Linux was made. I considered myself somewhat capable of handling a new system, so I went ahead and burned myself a boot disc from another computer and inserted it into my disc tray.
Within minutes my new Operating System, Ubuntu, was up and running. My initial excitement slowly faded to sheer terror as the sudden realization that I would have to manually customize my entire OS before I would be able to run any of my school programs. The University of Phoenix does not allow the submission of documents that do not end in the .docx format that comes with using Microsoft Office 2007. Linux offers an open source office suite, but because of copyrights, .docx will be a Microsoft-only format. Linux offers a program called WINE that allows you to run some Windows-based programs on the Ubuntu OS. This program saved me from having to buy another Vista disc.
I am now two months into my experiment with Linux and have so far been impressed by how much Linux has to offer. It isn't an easy tool to pick up, but once you learn some of the ins and outs of Ubuntu, you will find it to be a rewarding experience. I am probably going to come back to this topic once in awhile. There are literally thousands of websites that allow newbies like me to become familiar with the program. I would invite anyone with any computer knowledge and general curiosity to try Ubuntu. You can always run the program next to Vista or XP without having to sacrifice your original OS. It takes time and at more than a few times I felt that understanding Linux was an exercise in sado-masochism, but in the end it has really been beneficial in that I now have a lot more control over my computer. Not only are the open-source programs mad eof excellent quality and work better than most Microsoft programs, they are all free and are fully customizable.
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