Big Love: A Black Man and His New Feisty Fawn

I got a new Inspiron 1501 with the AMD 64-bit processor. It's nice. REALLY nice.
The the first thing I did was connect the machine to our LAN and popped in a disk running Ubuntu 7.04.
After setting the CD/DVD drive to be the first bootable disk, I proceeded with the installation of Ubuntu's latest distribution designed to run off of the 64 processor.
That's right, like a red-headed illegitimate love child denied before eyes would even set upon it, I gave Windows Vista the boot without even giving it a boot.
The installation was pretty quick, like 20 minutes or so, following the usual prompts of naming the machine, getting the time zone set, all that shit. Ubuntu (sort of) recognized the wireless card, but I new that I would have to deal with compiling the card based on my research of users who installed Ubuntu on the same machine I bought.
At this point, you're probably wanting to know why I just didn't order the 1501 with Ubuntu already installed since Dell is now selling PCs with Linux on them. But I want to learn the technology and the best way to do that is to go through the processes of installations, compiling to get things working, etc. The thing is Ubuntu is embraced by a lot of Linux novices and gurus alike, because the distribution's basic nature could be compared to Window's and Mac OS's approach to the desktop environment; everything is pre-installed (almost) and is ready to run out of the box.
I played around with Fedora Core right after it became a community distro and Red Hat went on its merry corporate way, and I had to tinker to get things to work, but that was the way I learned.
However, I always gravitated back to Windows when it came to the production side of my life.
Then came Ubuntu. I first installed 6.04 on my old Clamshell G3 Mac. As it turned out, that would be the last powerpc distribution Ubuntu would make. I noticed that I felt more at home with Ubuntu than previous ditros of Linux – not to say that the other distributions are bad, or not user-friendly, it's that everything came easier to me using Ubuntu when it came to installing apps.

Anyway, needless to say, the mac's performance when it came to it's hardware and wireless connection for a model that old was no longer an option for me. I was now ready, more than ever to take the plunge and leave the Windows/Mac world altogether, but I needed a serious machine to do so.
With R writing her book, our workspace was getting crowded to say the least and I didn't care to work on my old Fedora/Window desktop machine anymore. It was time for me to go mobile now; and I was going to do it with Ubuntu Linux.

After the installation, the first task I wanted to get at was getting the wifi to work.
I found this great post on the Ubuntu forum to help me out with this part since Ubuntu's disk installation had some old or incompatible drivers that wouldn't allow the card to initialize. The thing is Dell sells and ships so many PCs, that it's very hard for OS makers of any kind to keep up with peripherals I guess, so you have to make some adjustments. Compiling device drivers or modifying kernels is still a mystery to me.
I basically research the issue I have when it comes to getting some hardware or software to work in Linux, and as always I find a solution and follow the directions.
Sometimes I have to depend on being resourceful if the directions miss details, but like I said – that's a good thing, because it's all part of the learning process. Anyway, after a restart, I was on some neighbor's wireless network in no time!

Right now, I'm still trying to get Audacity to work. The installation on my old Ubuntu machine worked fine without any problems, but like I mentioned earlier, my new machine is running the new 64-bit processor which is new for a lot of software developers out there no matter the OS.

Still, I'm in fucking love right now and I can't wait get at my creative work and school work.