After yet another surgery last December, I was finally able to do something I actually like doing about six weeks ago. Things are slowly but surely beginning to resemble normalcy.
After getting our tax refund, it seemed a good time to build a new computer. As I always have pieces and parts about, it’s not too expensive. I had a case already, but it only accepts a micro-ATX board. It seemed like a good excuse to try AMD’s 780G chipset. This chipset integrates ATI HD 3200 graphics on the north bridge, and allows adding a graphics card in a PCIe x 16 slot to achieve crossfire performance.
My choices included: a Gigabyte MA78GM-US2H mother board, AMD Athlon X2 7750 cpu (Kuma core, AM2+), and 4 GB of OCZ Gold 1066 DDR2 RAM. I ended up replacing a power supply too before the build was stable, so I bought an OCZ StealthXStream 500w PS. All of this stuff went into a nice black mATX case along with a 250 GB WD SATAII drive (with Ubuntu 8.04 already installed on it) and a Samsung OEM DVD-RW that were in the original Ubuntu box I had.
Now you might be asking whatever possessed me to use a drive with a pre-installed OS on it. It was kind of a test of the stability of Ubuntu. Could it handle all the hardware changes, including going from an Nvidia FX 5500 AGP discrete graphics card to the ATI built-in graphics. This transition seemed easier than a motherboard swap I did on my wife’s computer last fall under XP without a fresh install. Even though all data was backed-up first in both cases, it was still less labor intensive than having to re-install all software and reload that data. But with Windows, I had to back-step service packs first, then re-install SP 3 and all the updates subsequent to that. What a pain!
Additionally, we have lots of data, some over 25 years old that has crossed from an Atari 8-bit, to an Atari ST, then a Mac+ (System 6.0.x), Mac II (System 7.1), then to Windows 3.x, through ‘95, ‘98, NT 3.51, NT 4.0, XP, and now Linux. I know what you’re thinking̶–what kind of fool does that? My answer is: just a fool that can’t let go of the first BASIC code he ever wrote.
After 2 incremental upgrades to Ubuntu, I now have Ubuntu 9.04 as my main platform on fairly modern hardware. So far, I like it, and without having to do an OS re-install. Only problem is the ATI 3D driver doesn’t fully support Compiz. But I can live without all the bells and whistles Compiz adds. Yes, Compiz looks nice when it works, but I can’t see the benefit in terms of functionality over the plain Gnome desktop, now at version 2.26.1 with Ubuntu 9.04. That’s good enough for me.
Ubuntu 9.04 is great! My wife will continue being a Windows user (it helps pay the bills), but I see no reason for me to ever go back. And I’m not going to need to purchase Windows 7 twice for our separate personal computers. Goodbye to Microsoft and their intrusive Genuine Advantage or whatever they’re going to call it now. And goodbye for now to the hassles of anti-virus worries.
Posted by d.j. 