Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Hi everyone.  After reading a bunch of doc over the last couple of weeks in my holiday to give myself a good understanding of how this OS works, as of this morning, I seem to have joined the ranks of GNU/Linux users.  It wasn't quite what I expected; it was definitely more awesome.

I have two hard drives, but only one was working.  One had been jarred by my desk door, refused to load anymore, ripped out and replaced under warranty -- "faulty" drive was thrown aside as junk and not returned to me, surprisingly, but I requested it by mail.  I got it back three weeks later, and yep, it was useless.  err1err3: cannot find drive, resetting BIOS fails, attempted data recovery fails.  I'm not an extremely experienced user, but I think I tried everything within my limit.

The other drive was the one they replaced my faulty one with -- took them almost a month to "fix" my computer with this new HDD complete with wrong drivers (couldn't understand my resolution), multiple copies of conflicting drivers, badly partitioned, invalidated, perpetually unupdated copy of vista.  Not a sweet deal after losing so much data, though it was partly my fault for not double-checking my windows backup discs would actually work when it came to crunch (they failed too).

So before installing my beginner's distro of choice over (or with, which wasn't preferable) a faulty Vista on my only working hard drive, I thought I'll give that old, broken "jarred" hard drive one last shot by switching it to the master position and running a freshly made copy of Ubuntu Live CD.  I really didn't expect much more than the scraping of misaligned platters, but it actually loaded.  Running a scan says no disk errors -- must be that stupid win kernel refusing to load!  I get a bit excited and try to boot my broken windows from within the linux CD.  It still fails with the same error, so I say a sad goodbye to my lost data, and allow my distro to repartition over the entire drive.

Hello Ubuntu, I seem to love you already.  The last few unanswered questions left before I took the plunge showed themselves to be no problem at all by the time it was done.  It seems to have auto-detected my router and wireless home network settings, so I could pretty much open firefox and start browsing.  The desktop and windows manager seems pretty intuitive to customise and navigate.  Seems like I can take my time with a firewall/anti-virus setup, not something I have to rush to avoid anything.  Then I realised I could open Pidgin and tell my friends about it right away -- nice (though I plan to try alternatives, and find my favourite).  I've tried a bit of this and that since this morning, and haven't faced any scary problems or bad experiences that make new users run back to Windows, which is great, as I've already decided I'm sick of it, was starting to loathe it, and I'm rather stubborn as far as these things go.  I'm realistically expecting a few things to perturb me within the next week or so, but with the way things are going already, I have to wonder if it won't just be continually fantastic.

And the best part is because Ubuntu unexpectedly saved my old drive, I now have two working drives.  My only question so far is: Should I keep that drive with the crappy copy of Vista, eventually replace it with XP or 7, so I have a spare drive for gaming purposes.  Or should I make use of the fact they're both SATA, give it all up to Ubuntu, scrap Windows altogether, and run my games in some sort of "virtual machine"?

Oh, and I went straight over to mum's and ran the Live CD inside HER broken, refusing-to-boot windows PC as a "test drive", asked her if she was remotely interested in this safe, stable new OS if I could make it work her "computer, emails and internet" again.  She's a basic user, so I ran through a few things quickly to make sure she knew it would be "rather difficult" and "VERY DIFFERENT" but that I could set up an account & permissions for her so she wouldn't accidentally break it; to my surprise she said, "Yes!  Put it on, I like it.. it's working again!"

I said, "Yes, yes it is.  And should probably remain working from now on."

*two thumbs up*