As the second semester finally closes on what seems like a fruitful year, for myself and for Linux, the amount of free time that I have has greatly increased. This however lead a good friend of mine to approach me with his very sad looking laptop, begging for some help. His fairly new Dell laptop was, very sadly, chug to the brim of heavenly maleware. Since he was a good friend of mine I happily, well at least willingly, lended him a helping hand in his technical hour of need.

Unfortunately, a couple of tests indicated that this was not going to be one small matter. In fact, his entire Windows XP experience was quite twisted. Fortunately for me he had al his documents backed up like a good pc user, however, everyone has their little demons inside and it was quickly established that he had lost all his system disks. Awesome. Luckily for me our department had a few OEM disks lying around for Dell laptops, and with a quick prayer to the licensing gods, I completed a fresh install of Windows XP

After what seemed like eternity, with a fair bit of mucking around with pydance on my ow laptop, I completed a fresh, licensed install of XP pro with SP3 over the top, running smoothly on his machine. But most lf you already know what is coming next, for when I say smoothly I mean ignoring that huge ugly yellow question mark that alerts all users that XP does not recognise any of the worthwhile drivers. This implies no video, no ethernet, no sound, not exactly a perfect environment to hand back to your good friend. So with my laptop in one hand and google in the other, I trawelled the Dell website hoping for a quick and easy solution, I was wrong.

As I punched in the credentionals of the laptopn I was greeted by a sea of choices for drivers to components of laptops of different models, years and motherboards. I still get confused writing about it. While contemplating whether I had the effort to fix this problem I kept thinking that just last week, when I myself completed a reinstall with a fresh distribution of ubuntu, how easily the OS picked up what my hardware was and just worked. Not wanting to install all drivers for all catagories onto the laptop and hope for the best, I did the next best thing. Booting up the Ibex 8.10 live CD in the laptop.Thankfully after running the hardware test and a frantic scribble of all the results, I was finally able to pick the correct drivers out of the rubbish and successfully complete the installation of Windows.

As I glance at my watch, a full five hours later, and listen to the rumble of my stomache my mind loops back and concludes. Had Ubuntu already been on this laptop, the maleware would have never infected this system. if he had let me install ubuntu from the beginning, hardware recognition would have been eas, even if he had ever wanted to upgrade to the newest release. By using ubuntu he uses productivity software and web-based apps. Plus he supports a growing open source community. Why don't more people grab Ubuntu?

Zachary Rappell

"Give me your tux"