Ubuntu Linux Is Dead, Long Live Ubuntu Linux

The VAR Guy received a rude greeting when he returned home from a business trip last night. His Ubuntu PC from Dell was dead. Fried. Done. Well, not entirely. But things were bad. The PC was displaying a bunch of errors and never fully booted up. But this sad story has a happy ending for The VAR Guy and Ubuntu.

The problems started after a nasty wind and rain storm on Long Island Monday night. Apparently, the storm knocked out power to The VAR Guy’s home — a sprawling mansion on Long Island’s famed Gold Coast, or so he likes to imagine. The power problems apparently caused the Ubuntu PC to partially boot up and power down multiple times that evening. The VAR Guy’s wife dialed our resident blogger on Tuesday morning, saying Ubuntu had been reduced to a bunch of errors, no user interface … not even a command line. Call it the black screen of (near) death.

By the time The VAR Guy got home Tuesday night, he feared the worst. He’s a Linux novice and certainly didn’t know how to “recover” data on the system. So he decided to take the easiest route possible, and installed Ubuntu 7.10 from a CD-ROM.Would this be an all night install — like in the world of Windows? Would it take hours to configure the operating system and related applications? Would our frustrated blogger have to “activate” dozens of applications using annoying online registration forms?

Actually, The VAR Guy was shocked by Ubuntu’s ease of install. With a few clicks of a mouse, the entire process required 20 minutes or less. Not just the operating system, folks. The install included OpenOffice, FireFox, and plenty of other third-party applications. Try that with your Windows/Microsoft Office set-up, folks.So, shame on The VAR Guy for not using power protection to safeguard his Ubuntu PC. And shame on him for not backing up his data off-site.

But thank you to the folks at Canonical for making Ubuntu an operating system that requires only minutes — rather than hours — to get going.