I've had several comments on my Ubuntu experience, my most popular entry to date (and here I thought I would mostly be blogging about law school). I thought I'd take a moment to update everyone on my foray into Linux.

Ubuntu 6.06 ("Dapper Drake") ran on my desktop for about a month. At this point, 6.10 ("Edgy Eft") was released. I read some unfavorable words regarding the upgrade process. I backed up my wife's files and dove right in. d^_^b

The upgrade broke my ATI drivers. In attempting to fix them, I broke my GUI a couple of times. In my frustration I noted that a fresh install of Edgy was supposed to be much more reliable. So I tried that. My initial impression was that it was faster to boot and had several minor improvements to the user experience; I liked it. Then I tried to download some files via BitTorrent, and my computer hard locked.

I spent all of my free time for a few days trying to chase down the problem. All torrent clients, from Azureus to KTorrent to BitTornado, had the same problem: once uploading began, my computer went down and went down hard. The Ubuntu forums were surprisingly no help. I tried Ubuntu, I tried Kubuntu. It was especially frustrating to have to boot back into Windows to download the Kubuntu distribution. When nothing I tried worked, I actually downloaded and installed Fedora Core 6. It didn't recognize my wireless card and when I couldn't figure out ndiswrapper in two hours, I called it a wash.

The question then became: what now? Go back to Windows? I still boot to Windows to play my games, after all. But must I put up with the frequent crashing just for BitTorrent functionality? Nothing else seemed to be wrong with 6.10; just torrents. I think it has something to do with my wireless card, but 6.06 had no such problems.

Finally, I just reinstalled Ubuntu 6.06. It works great--it recognizes my wireless card, my digital camera, it just works and it's spectacular. It's a Long Term Support release, so it hasn't been completely replaced by 6.10. I don't want to go back to Microsoft, and so far there's no need. I just hope the next Ubuntu release ("Feisty Fawn") is as top-notch as Dapper Drake.