A few months ago, the Windows installation on my home laptop crashed irrecoverably. Windows will not boot in regular or safe mode or any other way. I have no intention of reinstalling Windows and I could not repair it from installation disks. In fact even the repair partition on the Thinkpad will not boot. Thankfully I had an Ubuntu Linux (6.06 LTS – Long Term Support – Dapper Drake) partition with which I dual boot.
I’ve started using Anjuta for web development. I have Opera and Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird for Email, Open Office for Word/Powerpoint/Excel, VLC to play movies/music etc. So far I don’t miss any applications that I had under windows except SQLYog (there are Linux replacements but SQLYog is my favorite) and I have that working very well with Wine. I can also get to my Windows partitions and get any files that I need.
My first minor complaint is inconvenient wireless setup – the Dapper Drake wireless is good enough for my purpose but not really very nice. It seems Ubuntu has improved the wireless features in their latest release Fiesty, however I will wait for the next LTS release before I upgrade.
My only other complaint – not so minor – is that Hibernation does not work.
Hopefully a future version will fix that.