Ubuntu Rocks (call it ubuntued)

I recently bought a Dell laptop for one of my team member for J2EE development. We got a new and shiny laptop delivered promptly on-time by Dell. But the big surprise is when we booted it: Out of 1G ram, the pre-installed gloat-ware took almost 700-800Meg of RAM.

Obviously the remaining 200Meg is not enough for my team member to do any kind of development. He had to use MySQL, Ecplise, JBoss and quite a few other tools. As a result, he decided to clean the gloat-ware. After spending 2 hrs, we were able to bring down the used memory to 350Meg. I was ok and quite happy with it. However, my team member was not happy with it and asked my permission to try Ubuntu. All his friends are big Ubuntu fans. I was little apprehensive about it in the beginning, but gave the go ahead – My thought was… it is a brand new laptop and if needed windows can be reinstalled quickly.

Now the interesting part — I didn’t see my team member for two days as I was travelling. But when I saw him the next-time, I could see this huge smile on his face. Initially I was little skeptical, but was blown away by his demo. Everything worked except the Wifi, which is ok since wifi is not allowed in our workspace.

Now my Ubuntued (I would like to claim ownership to this word invention!!) team member is in the process of converting his co-workers.

I will write more about Ubuntu and our experience in the upcoming days.