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You know my P4 is broken. So now, I'm using the AMD64 notebook from my parents. I allready had Ubuntu running on that, but without WLAN support. I installed vpnc for AMD64 (downloaded the .deb and used dpkg) and attached my computer to the router with a cable connection. Everything was fine, I could use it the way I wanted, no problems, seemed nice. But some things are missing: first of all, I want to use the wireless connection. ndiswrapper isn't an option, because there aren't any 64bit drivers for my WLAN device. It seems that the vendor is waiting for WinXP64bit to release them. Any other bad things: some other software isn't ported to the 64bit platform allready. I don't want to compile all stuff manually, I want to use my computer as soon as possible. So I decided to re-install Ubuntu with the fresh release of Ubuntu Hoary (i386) and give it a try.

The results are pretty good! The installer is very simple, quite fast and after that, you have a complete running system. I needed to install vpnc to access the internet at our student home, but that was no problem. Everything went just fine. The ubuntu website and wiki also provide lots of good information about restricted formats and so on. I really love it. I even love it so much, that I'm thinking about using it on my new laptop instead of Gentoo. The great advantage is that I have a running system with all features in about one hour, vpnc and restricted formats and so on included. With Gentoo, this can take a lot longer. If I need new software: apt-get or synaptic, wait ten seconds, OK. With Gentoo, again, this can take some time. I don't already know what it'll be. Off course, ikke is lobbying for Gentoo ;-)

Even my girlfriend likes Ubuntu! Till now on, she was using SuSE, but she had a few problems with it. She couldn't play DVD's, but now it seems that her hardware (the DVD drive) is broken. There were also some other problems making her think about using another distro. Now, with her final year thesis, she needs to use Corel Draw, and so Windows. So she had to repartition her harddisk and re-install linux (and windows). Because her DVD-drive didn't read the SuSE DVD, she tried Kubuntu. Yeah, she's a real KDE-lover. She loves fisherprice-looking buttons ;-) Kubuntu set up quite quickly, some problems with the wlan (using ndiswrapper instead of the native prism54 driver wich should be working normally), but now everything's fine. She loves it. Now her laptop is making a sound like a cow when starting up. Yes, she's a little bit crazy and I love it! ;-)

With WVS, we gave a LiveCD lesson last week. Not so much people, but others told me they didn't now it on time. The ten persons who were there were quite enthousiast. They loved ubuntu and most of them should try to install it on their computer. I'm sure Ubuntu has a great momentum now and has a great chance to become one of the most popular distro's in the world!