sarp centel

Sometimes we face obstacles that block our way, things that slow down our progress in achieving what we want. Yet what people see as obstacles, can be, just the opposite in fact. Richard Feynman describes his love for teaching in his book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr.Feynman!” and criticizes the view of teaching as an interruption to doing research: “…I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever….They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas….Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from students. Nothing!”. I have witnessed a similar phenomenon when people try to work too hard by isolating themselves from all social interactions, without re

When I received my free Ubuntu 6.06 LTS CD by mail, I wasn’t planning to install Ubuntu at all. Eventhough I support the open source movement, I’m still not a big fan of linux as an end user. I thought maybe that could change, just maybe Linux had evolved by now. And believe me, it had been a very, very long time since I tried a new linux distro. Fedora was installed on my machine and I didn’t even remember the password to login to the system. Heck, it was time to install Ubuntu. Dadada ….

Ubuntu first boots up a live distribution, meaning that you can use nearly all the features of the operating system without installing it in the first place. This improves the user experience tremendously, since you can listen to music, play games or browse the web while the system is busy installing Ubuntu on your computer. I remembered the old days of waiting 30 minutes in front of the computer, being able to do nothing while Windows is being installed.

The setup took roughly 10 minutes, but it was not without problems. Ubuntu couldn’t configure grub properly and I had to spend the whole day just to figure out what went wrong. As it turns out, both of my harddisks were configured as slave and Ubuntu was not clever enough. I became more disappointed when I noticed that the default installation doesn’t let you watch DVDs, listen to MP3s or view PDFs and requires some configuration. Nevertheless, I had a chance to try out XGL and it is very cool. While it isn’t revolutionary, XGL is a promising precursor of what to expect in the future. In the end, Linux is pretty complicated even for a computer whiz and still not suitable for home users. 

desktop experience, it certainly enhances usability and is a precursor of the future experience. As it turns out, Linux is still too complicated even for a computer whiz, and not suitable for home users yet.