It just works.

And guess what, I'm NOT talking about Apple Macintosh.

I was on the hunt, (yes, again) for new linux distributions to mess around with. I've been building, playing with, and rebuilding a LAMP box for some time now, and I thought I'd give the old machine a new workout, and try some different kinds of linux.

Well, I started by downloading the latest Red Hat offering, Fedora. Nice. Pretty. Totally overwhelming, even for me. The default installs are a little large, but I was playing server admin, so I thought I'd go for it. Turns out the system I was installing on had a fickle CD rom drive that chewed up a couple of disks before I figured it out. Fedora, at that point, was ailing from badly installed packages, so I thought I'd move on.

Next, Slackware. Once referred to by a friend of mine as the ultimate OS. (He's now on Gentoo, I think.) So I load it up, four times. It had a great deal of difficulty installing the boot loader for a while, but I soon corrected that with a minor hardware mod. (Removed the second hard disk.) With that installed, it was a simple matter of a couple of compiles, and the second generation of the LAMP box was up and running.

Don Pardo: But wait, there's more!

Next was a tip of the hat from a work associate of mine, who pointed me towards Damn Small Linux. Damn small indeed, the entire OS fits in a ram disk. I've never seen this machine run that fast before. I was certainly impressed. The entire download was 50 MB, it installs embedded, if you like, in an emulator, so you can run it from within Windows. Why you'd want to do that, I do not know. Except to freak out the network admins at work, when they tell you over and over that linus is not a supported operating system. And here I am fixing SQL from the command line over SSH from a DSL session. Fun.

So today, I'm in gmail chat with Karen and she tells me some CD's have arrived for me. "Really? From where?" "Not sure. It looks German." WTF... I'm wondering. She messages me another couple words I don't recognize, then she sends one that reminds me I ordered a few CDs a couple of weeks ago: Ubuntu.

Ubuntu bills itself as linux for the common man. In the words of another PC company, "It just works." And indeed it does. I answered a few questions as part of the ASCII installer routine, and off it went. A couple hours later (hey, it's a 6x CD drive, gimme a break...) here I sit, in Firefox on Ubuntu, writing out this update. It really does just work. I'm a little hesitant almost, to put a LAMP install on here, since I'm rather pleased with it as a desktop. Maybe I'll even do some backups and install this on the main machine, a 2.8GHz Dell box I have here...

Actually, maybe I don't want to mess with the main machine too much. I'm not really sure what the restore routine actually does on that thing. So best to leave it be, I guess.

Still, this Ubuntu is really well done. Another selling point is that even the Enterprise version is totally free. So is all the included software, and patches, updates... new releases come out every six months. Speaking of free, so is the media. I ordered a pack of 5 CD packages, two CDs each. I plan to distribute the rest as I can, where I can. Security patches are released for 18 months for your version, should you choose not to upgrade. But why wouldn't you? It's a nice OS, so far. And really, it just works. Well.

Kudos, Ubuntu.