A few postings back we talked about open source operating systems and mentioned Ubuntu, a version of Linux.
We applied for a free copy of Ubuntu and received it yesterday after having to wait only 2 weeks despite warnings that it can sometimes take up to 10.
We did a live install last night and gave it a quick test run. The computer we tested it on is pretty old so a live boot is expected to run slow but it eventually loaded up alright. Ubuntu comes with The Gimp, Open Office and some other software for playing audio and video but unfortunately it jammed up the system to a halt when trying to view a .Png image from our hard disk. All we could do was switch off the PC using the on/off button (the keyboard buttons and mouse cursor would not work). I presume this was only a problem because we were trying to access a hard disk while the computer could barely deal with running the bootable operating system in the CD/DVD drive. I don't think anything like this would happen if Ubuntu was installed (well I hope not).
Well, from first impressions it seems a good alternative to windows but we'll keep it in it's case until we decide to take the big step of switching over completely to Ubuntu !
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