Ubutntu Studio 8.10

I just received a Dell Vostro 220 I bought about a week ago from dell. I needed a new computer for the new office, and dell had these computers for a very good deal.

My only gripe is that I was forced to buy Vista, which amounts to $100. My machine was $409 dollars, including a 22" Monitor. Nearly a quarter of that went to Microsoft, and, as I had no intention of ever even booting into Vista, I am slightly annoyed.

Worse, I can't seem to get any value from this legal Vista license I have. Though I never technically agreed to any software license agreement, the software is apparently hardware aware. Supposedly it is both illegal and unable to install on machines that don't have the same hardware as mine. I don't really understand how that works.

In any case, I allowed the computer to boot up to the point of asking me for the initial information that Vista wanted just to make sure the computer would boot at all.

I then immediately threw in the Ubuntu Studio disc, restarted the computer and am going through the install process now. Ubuntu studio is probably not ideal for me, as I will mostly be hacking around in php files and browsing the internet rather than doing graphic and video editing, but there was a disc around and I figured its linux, I can make it do whatever I want in the end anyway.

The only little hitch I've had so far is it didn't detect DHCP settings automatically. I just put in an IP (192.168.1.69) that I knew would be open on the network and I imagine it will work fine. I accepted the default settings for gatweway and nameserver

Well.. I know you can't see the time passing as I write this, but it took about 15-20 minutes and I just booted up into a clean looking GUI with my 1600x1050 resolution working correctly. Firefox loaded, the internet is working.

The first site I went to was gdradio.net, to test the sound. I don't have speakers, only headphones. Flash wasn't installed by default, but it gave me a little pop up, the install went smoothly. Now to test the sound..

Well it wanted load up the stream in 'movie player' which is fine. I have one gripe so far, when it was asking to look for codecs to handle the stream, it is giving me an error that "The use of this software may be restricted in some countries. You must verify the following is true: you are of legal age, its not illegal, etc.." That's incredibly lame. Not only that, it asked me twice because there were two plug ins. Will have to figure out how to disable this.

Now to test the sound again. Streaming gdradio.net flawlessly. Lovely