Life in Silico
Finally it had to crash. It served me quite well for over 4 years. Finally when it happened it was not a hardware glitch as I expected. I tried to clean up the system with a new software and it cleaned it up for good. Bill Gates' Microsoft refused to start after that complaining incessantly of corrupted system file. Unfortunately I didn't even have the original operating system CD, let alone any rescue disk. As I was expecting this to happen, I had multiple backups of all important data. So I decided to relegate it to the metaphoric attic, which in my Dubai home was the little space under the bed. But that was before the Tux sitting comfortable on my book stand gave me a sly smile.So I decided to install Linux. I have used the red hat few years back for running bioinformatics software not available for windows platform. But now most of the bioinformatics software is available for windows and there is no real need to use Linux So I had forgotten Linux for sometime (Linux geeks would never forgive me for that!). I decided to give it a try again to keep my Tux happy.
I was sure Red hat wouldn't be my first choice. It had already expanded to three full CDs few years back. I googled a bit to find the right linux which would be kind to my old buddy. Something that would never put his senile processor nor his fading 512 MB memory to too much stress. Finally I found the right medicine. 'Xubuntu'!
Xubuntu is Ubuntu for old laptops. I downloaded the single CD ISO in little over 4 hours and burned it on a CD with Nero. I put it in the CD drive and started the laptop. It booted nicely from the CD and it even had the provision to use the OS directly from the CD without touching the hard disk. Xubuntu detected all my hardware including the wireless network card directly from the CD and I was quite impressed. So I decided to do a full system install after formatting the hard disk.
The installation was uncomplicated and I got home free in less than thirty minutes. It had my favourite firefox already installed along with thunderbird. The open source word processor Abiword was already there.
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