As if installing one operating system (a reinstall of Windows on my desktop) weren’t enough of a job for the weekend, I took the opportunity to try something which had failed when I tried it a few months ago.

I have a second-hand, but quite serviceable, laptop, which was pretty much given to me by a friend. But I don’t have the Windows disk or serial number for it, and when I’ve tried to upgrade or update I got an error message about Windows not being genuine. So I’ve wanted for some time to try putting Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu is a form of Linux with a Windows-like interface.

I tried installing Ubuntu a few months back with no success, even though I thought the laptop met all the specs. But I tried again this time, and I think the difference may have been that I made more space on the disk drive, and had taken out some partitions, before the install.

I have to say my first impressions of Ubuntu are quite positive. It comes with Firefox, OpenOffice.org and GIMP already installed, which I liked, as well as with a number of games and a few other applications. It runs like a charm, and on the old laptop the performance improvement is really noticeable.

I was worried that it wouldn’t come with all the drivers I needed for the laptop, but it did. I had to download a sort of adapter which allows me to use the Windows version of my wireless card driver. That appears to be set up correctly, but I won’t know for sure until I take the laptop to a hot spot and try it out.

Maybe after the holidays, I can try setting up a wireless network between the desktop and the laptop.