In all my years of using computers quite heavily, I’ve been a Windows user 99% of the time.  But I have used other OSes, particularly Linux in certain work environments.  I’ve configured PXE-boot network-driven automated installs of Suse and Red Hat, tweaked NFS and Samba on Linux servers in a network of mixed client OSes (Linux and Windows), and have played around with Debian a bit on a personal computer.  Yesterday I wanted to set up a file server at work without having to deal with getting a Windows server license, so I decided to go with the Linux distribution that everyone seems gaga for, Ubuntu.

Now, to be fair, I was installing on an old machine that I hadn’t used much beforehand, so it’s possible it may have some hw issues independent of the OS it’s running, so some of my issues could be related to that.  Its CD-ROM drive had apparently died, for one thing, and it had issues booting an OS off of a USB key.  But before I installed Ubuntu, it seemed to boot into Windows consistently, so the vital components appeared to be working.  Anyway, I just wanted to say that some of my issues below could be due to hw, although again, Windows didn’t seem to have problems.

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