Installation

The installation process was fairly painless. Good news: I managed to get through it by myself. It also appears all of my hardware was detected, but i'll do a full inventory later. It wasn't all smooth sailing however. Below is a brief account of my newbie related difficulties:

Networking

I was unable to properly configure my ADSL internet connection during the installation. The network configuration gave me no choice (for what I saw) of specifying an ADSL connection. As a result, it tried in vain to connect to my 'network' which, in actuality, is just a network card connected to my ADSL modem. Given the choice of repeating the fruitless search for a non existen network, or skipping the step and configuring it later, I chose the latter.

Partitioning

Partitioning my hard drive gave me a good deal of grief. From what I could gather it was a bit like where I have to choose the installation drive in the windows xp setup. Except when I went to create a partition it gave me a list of filesystem types I had never heard of.

I chose the filesystem by using a process of elimination. I imagined that the names were being read to me by The Movie Theater Preview Guy. The coolest sounding name would win. Names like swap space didn't do it for me so they were first off the list. It ended up being a contest between Ext3 and ReiserFS.

Ext3 presents itself as an acronymn to myself, hence I pronounce it 'ee, ex, tee, three.' This gives it a significant advantage to ReiserFS, because the added emphasis of sharp syllables really endear themselves to the rugged qualities of the Movie Theater Preview Guy's voice. ReiserFS sounded limp by comparison. I'm sure there's a far more professional method of choosing filesystems, but i'm a newbie so what do I care? It's all hard drive to me.

As a newbie i've got two immediate questions about the partitioning process:

1) Why was I given the choice in the first place? I know nothing of the nuances of linux filesystems (but i'm sure it's a riveting story). I just want to use one that works. If they all work, what's the harm in offering one?

2) If there's a compelling reason why I must choose my own filesystem, can I at least have a couple of sentences on the screen explaining in really simple terms what it is i'm choosing?

If an operating system presents itself as the human alternative, it will have to do a little better to hide the partitioning process from newbies such as myself. It was especially ironic that I was given the option of entering 'expert' mode, as if to say the feature I was presently using was the dumbed down newbie version. That was not newbie friendly.

Video

The video configuration process produced interesting results, to say the least. I selected the native resolution for my laptop's LCD. There were no options to configure my multi monitor setup, but that's fair enough, i'd probably just configure it in the GUI like in Windows.

The fun started when I restarted the computer. Upon booting into Ubuntu, The LCD switched off, my secondary monitor flickered on and displayed the login screen in widescreen resolution. Well that's odd - I would've thought Ubuntu would treat my laptop's LCD as the default monitor, considering it's actually part of my laptop. Okay, no big deal. I would change the multi monitor settings in the GUI after logging in.

Not so fast mate! A frustrating search revealed no obvious menu entry related to changing multi monitor settings. Until I can sort this out i'm left with three choices: CRT, LCD (not both), or both CRT and LCD in windows.

For the time being i've returned to windows. I've had enough linux for today.

But I shall return...