OK, I have not posted here in a while, largely due to my overwhelming personal life. Therefore, I thought that I would make this post a good one. This is especially for all of you who have been wanting to get old tech up and running and doing more than just web surfing.

I have an old IBM Thinkpad X21. It is thin and light (3.1 pounds) has a 20 gig drive, 700MHz PIII, 12.1 inch 1024×768 screen and decent battery life. I even have a docking station for it that, among other things, allows it to basically become a desktop system. It is a great little machine as PC’s go and, because of it’s size, very portable. But it is also probably pushing the limits for a usable installation of Windows. What better opportunity to give it a little Linux love.

Now, I know many of you are asking, “Hey Patrick, you are a Mac guy with a Powerbook. Why do you need a Linux laptop?” Well, here is the deal. As many of you know, I am living between two houses right now and will be for a little while longer. I am getting tired of dragging my machine back and forth between the two places. Having this one set up permanently at the new house will save me a bunch of hassle.

Many of you are aware of Ubuntu. It is quickly becoming one of the more popular Linux distros and for good reason. It is easy to install, has a wide range of hardware support, is very easy to use and has great community support. With a new version recently released (6.06 LTS) there could not be a better time to give it a spin around the old hardware block. It also is very efficient in use of disk space because the base install includes (almost) everything you need and nothing you don’t. But, do notice that little “a” word there – almost.

The fact of the matter is that while Ubuntu will give you a web browser (Firefox), e-mail client (Evolution), chat (Gaim), office suite (Open Office) – you get the idea – but there are a lot of things it leaves out. For instance you need a bunch of codecs for playing video, a lot of fonts to render web pages correctly, a decent media player, DVD encryption decoding… A whole bunch of stuff for making a machine for everyday use. There are many reasons, legal and otherwise, for leaving these out that takes too long to get into right now. Here are a couple of resources that really helped me get all of these things and more after the install.

Prepping Dapper for Everyday Use – This was a great starting point for everything from configuring the look and feel of the desktop to installing MS like fonts (It is a Windows world after all). It is written from the perspective of a beginner Ubuntu user and has just a few things to tweak it here and there.

Windows to Ubuntu Transition Guide – Even if you are not a Windows user this is hands down the best guide I have come across so far for turning Ubuntu into a highly usable everyday system. The single best item in the article is a pointer to a package of scripts called Automatix. Automatix basically does all of the work for you and downloads, installs and handles all the dependencies for just about everything one would need. This includes Acrobat Reader, VLC, every codec for any multimedia you will ever need and much, much more.

Because of this I now have a great little everyday machine that is fast and portable and capable of doing almost anything I could ask of it. I hope this helps any of my fellow geeks out there who have given Linux a try and been less than impressed, left wanting more or did not have the skills needed to get stuff working.