In my previous article, I was talking (rather ranting…) about how dejected I’m with Microsoft Vista. I believe it was good in one way as it made me explore the latest version of a cool and elegant desktop Linux operating system (OS) – Ubuntu 8.04 LTS!. If you’re in India and if you’re planning to download it, I would suggest you use the Singapore mirror for the same – blazing speed!

I’m not gonna talk much about the operating system; ‘ll just include some screen shots from my system so that you can get a clear picture of how good it looks – anyways, looks are subjective. Functionally, I’m finding it to be too good, and Linux has come a long way in trying to render a typical Microsoft-ish user friendliness in its user interfaces. Mine is a Pentium dual core 2.7 GHz system with 512 MB RAM and 80 GB hard disk, and the entire installation took a little over twenty minutes and 2.2 GB of hard disk space. All of the peripherals got detected (including my 802.11 b/g wireless adapter), and I didn’t have trouble looking for hardware drivers – which is a great thing, look where Linux has come!

Immediately after installation, you reboot your system, and to my surprise there was this extremely clean and user friendly ‘Ubuntu Update’ system that warned me that my OS is out of date, and some 107 updates are available for download. I happily updated my system, and also downloaded a few more applications for video, music, internet and graphics. After a fresh install of the OS, you are left with no mp3/mpeg/avi support, and I was astonished to find that I’m able to automatically search and install the suitable codec as and when I click on the multimedia files encoded in different formats – great stuff!

And now, ‘m just gonna shut up and show you those screen shots. I would be happy to see more users switch to Ubuntu Linux And if at all you happen to install and use Ubuntu, please share your thoughts and comments here.

Well, if you want any specific screenshot, scrap a comment and you’ll have it here!!