For all of us (including myself) who have never seen a world outside Windows, Ubuntu is one of the ZILLION available distributions of Linux. I thought of trying Unix or Linux couple of times but every time got lost in the long list of distributions and couldn't decide where to start. But believe or it not its a pretty amazing world out there.

Canonical Ltd. released Ubuntu 7.10 a couple of days ago and I decided to install whatever the case is. I didn't want to mess up the current configuration running Vista so the obvious choice was to add one more virtual machine to the pile in Virtual PC 2007.

Step by step installation process is described here.

I did run into an issue where Virtual PC was clipping the ubuntu desktop and left me with only 30% desktop visibility. It was quick to fix though by changing "Window Resizing" options in Display tab for Machine settings in Virtual PC.

Its a long a way to go for me to learn linux and for Ubuntu to establish itself as a competitor to Windows and Mac. Wait a min...., my display is all crippled after I restarted it to make changes effective so that it can allow me to choose higher resolutions. Damn it. Now I don't know how to fix this. OK, lets start from scratch again. And this time I'm going to make a base HDD and do all the experiments in differential HDD.

I wish it was more user friendly. When you compare it with Windows and Mac, the barrier of entry is very high. And the best part is, if someone asks anything on community forums, those xorg geeks start telling them terminal commands. I think this is one major part Linux is lacking at. :)

Still, I think its fun to use Ubuntu and it has tremendous possibilities. Being free and major community involvement for localization, I think it will really help bringing people (non-IT) towards computers in countries like mine.