Ubuntu Linux

So I keep hearing about "Ubuntu" this and "Ubuntu" that. I look it up, and it's african for "beautiful friendship" or "harmonious companionship" or "happy network administrators". One of those wild untranslatable words that means a hundred things. Aside from that, however, it's also apparently some new and special distribution of Linux.

Tim Bray of Ongoing has been keeping track of his experiences with Ubuntu on a super-swanky new Sun Ultra20. Sweet box, 64-bit processor, a small country's worth of RAM. I wish I had a reason to drop some dough on a piece like that - but I really don't. And "playing with a linux distro" doesn't quite justify it (for me, at least - Tim, however, got himself a great deal on it, so it's all good... I wish I had that kind of connection to the community...)

Anyway, Tim's been giving these little glimpses into it, things that work and things that don't, that sort of thing. In the spirit of this, I'm going to do something very similar, only my notes will be based on experiences with a really, really old and crappy Dell Optiplex G60, scavenged and patched together from three defunct Optiplexes. Way I figure, if it runs on this machine (and runs well), I'll be able to get a pretty good opinion of how it'll do in a more... stressful... environment. And so, the adventure begins! Ubuntu is currently being downloaded in several different flavors, and we'll see what happens.

Could it replace my Powerbook? Would it? I'm thinking that's not the purpose behind this experiment (aside from the fact that *nothing* can replace my Powerbook). But I'd definitely like to experiment with it and see how feasible it would be as a backup workstation... or maybe a really inexpensive box I could pair a grunt up with (maybe even a Windows grunt?) The geek gland throbs.