Its been two days now that I got the net running on Ubuntu. Its a great feeling posting from Ubuntu.

My ISP SifyBroadband gives a Dynamic IP connection, so I have to login everytime, despite having an Unlimited Connection. Since about 1 year they enforced their stupid and the most dumbest dialers on everyone.

Recently when I decided to shift fulltime to Linux, I found that their linux support was very primitive (a command based login) and it never ever seemed to work. Then I tried a few alternate GNU dialers available. I couldn’t get most of them to run (I an complete newbie when it comes to linux) and the one that I got to work was not accepted by their Servers. The only reason I have stuck to it is because its service is pretty reliable and really one of the most cheapest.

Well two days ago, I managed to crash Windows XP and reached Ubuntu (missed the 10 sec deadline in GRUB) and during the start up procedure noticed

Syncronizing clock with ntp.ubuntulinux.org [OK]

instead of the usual

Syncronizing clock with ntp.ubuntulinux.org [FAIL]

This was a bit of surprise and checked wether net was there. And to my surprise, I had an active net connection. Then well the net was working properly all day long, even managged to upgrade Firefox from 1.07 to 1.5 and apply a few updates. Also it didn’t even log me out during the two & half hour loadshedding in the other phase, when the network goes down (thats strange because they have something called heartbeats to check wether the connection is active or not).

Well for that matter I dont mind doing this, since crashing Windows XP is really easy (normal shut down procedure seem to get me loged out of Sify Servers). But the only greif is a process that should take only 30 secs now takes more than 10 minutes (I have an antique PC, it almost 6 years old).

Ubuntu 5.10 is really cool, although it lags a little bit compared to windows (I have only 64 MB RAM on a P3), but am sure will mange to get it to run at better speed than XP. Well I will end by blah blah here and look at getting used to with Ubuntu, and most importantly learn how to install a few of my favourite softwares, which are not available through the Synaptic Package Manger.