I’ve installed many distributions of linux (different versions of Red Hat and Mandrake) over the past seven years to play around with and the install process was always a little cumbersome. The user doing the install was always required to have some technical knowledge to get things installed and configured. I have to say though that Mandrake 10 was the easiest, that was until now.

I installed Ubuntu 6.10 last night and it was a breeze. It actually took me longer to get Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed and the Virtual Machine created than it took to install Ubuntu on the Virtual Machine. If you are looking for a Linux distro to install on a spare machine or even your primary pc then I would definately recommend Ubuntu.

It actually comes preinstalled with all the applications that the average user needs. This is one of the things that makes it (in my opinion) the best Linux distrobution thus far. Some of the applications that come preinstalled are:

  • Open Office 2.0
  • Firefox 2.0 web browser
  • Evolution Mail email client
  • GAIM Internet Messenger
  • 16 different games
  • GIMP Image Editor
  • A Movie Player
  • A Music Player
  • A CD Audio Ripping Application

Oh, and before I forget to mention; The installation CD for Ubuntu is a Live CD. This means you can boot up from the CD and try out Ubuntu without even installing it on your pc. Talk about easy to just dive in and try things out!

The guys that have been working on Ubuntu have done a wonderful job.

Now that I have Ubuntu installed, I need to get Mono installed so I can start doing .NET development on Linux. This is the whole reason I installed Ubuntu in the first place.