Foray Into Ubuntu

The other night I installed Ubuntu, a user-friendly if not the most user-friendly Linux OS distribution, on my mothballed classic Athlon 600. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about it, so I thought I’d install it on an old machine to use as a file server. If you’re at all curious, you should know that you can run a full demo of the operating system by booting from the Ubuntu install CD. It runs a virtual machine on your computer without touching your hard drive. I ran a demo to check it out and got thrashed at Chess, one of the many included games. Ubuntu is free if you download the CD as an ISO image and burn it to recordable media using pretty much any CD writing software. You can also buy CD’s. They’ll even send you free CD’s if you ask, but they say it may take up to ten weeks for delivery. When I installed Ubuntu from the CD, it was quick and painless! It was so simple. I was shocked. My previous experience had been with Slackware and Red Hat distros, and especially the older versions required a bit of technical know-how.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the default theme is quite pretty. I think so, anyway… At a glance, the top toolbar is reminiscent of Mac OS, while the bottom is similar to the the taskbar in Windows. The best of both worlds? The Chess game is open, as well as a neat app called Tomboy for taking and organizing notes. Since I wanted to use my old Athlon as a file server on a Windows network, I had to set up Samba so that I could share folders. Setting up Samba was simple…the OS told me I didn’t have the required packages installed and asked if I wanted to install them. Click, click, done. No compiling or any funky Linux stuff. Not yet, anyway… I tried to access the shared folder from my laptop running Windows XP SP2 but was not able to authenticate my username and password. Well, after some net-digging, I found this how-to “Setting Up Samba” on Ubuntu’s help site. The only relevant tidbit in this entire document turned out to be:

“Note: The default installation of Samba does not synchronize passwords. You may have to run “smbpasswd” for each user that needs to have access to his Ubuntu home directory from Microsoft Windows.”

Well, turns out Ubuntu is still Linux after all! I ran this command and then everything magically worked:

sudo  smbpasswd -a username

New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Added user username.

To top it off, I played another round of Chess and, well, lost less badly. Actually, I was quite proud of the first half of the game.