Ubuntu Update

With a little effort, I’ve got:

• Sound working
• The high-performance drivers for the NVIDIA video card working
• DVDs playing
• A connection to my external Firewire drive working so I can get stuff off of it that I put there while backing up my mac laptop… All the more cool because it’s formatted with a Mac partition, not a Linux one
• mldonkey running, which I would never ever use to download pirated movies in divx format, or songs in mp3 format, or share them of course
• mp3s and divx’s successfully playing
• CDs ripping

Still want to do:

• Get DVD-ripping going so I don’t need the DVD in the player to watch a movie. Tried this but ran into some weird problems that weren’t worth the effort to fix at that point.

Overall, while some of these things have required a little hackwork/voodoo, this is about a 10 to 20 times easier to use version of Linux than classic Debian was, and unlike the other “user friendly linuxes” like RedHat and SuSE and the like, it has a Debian-like elegance and openness.

good to know if I ever feel the need to leave OS X behind, a Linux as sweet as this is waiting for me.