I took my first tentative, real steps away from using Microsoft Windows last night by installing Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on a partition on my laptop. I’ve been playing with Ubuntu through Wubi, the disk-file installer for Ubuntu that lets you install and run the Linux OS under Windows.

But this is different: I’ve cleaned out a block of space on my hard drive, wiped out the old Windows partition, and installed Ubuntu natively - so I now have a dual-boot laptop.

The installation went very smoothly and was complete in about 20 minutes. After install, there were 5 updates, for a total of a 3Mb download, and everything just worked straight away - even my onboard ATI graphics card. So of course I installed Beryl for a bit of eye-candy. And again, it installed and ran first time.

The only issue I have is with my wireless networking card, but that’s not Ubuntu’s fault - by default the OS does not come with WPA support, and I happen to run WPA encryption on my wireless LAN and I had the same problem when I was running under Wubi. So once the final piece of software is installed, I’ll be up and running with a dual-boot wireless laptop.

One really interesting thing I’ve come across already is the way Ubuntu configures my laptop trackpad. By default it maps the right-hand edge to vertical scroll (with the bottom edge horizontal scroll), allowing me to scroll up and down by sliding my finger on the pad, rather than using mouse buttons. I cannot, for the life of me, get this working natively under Windows.

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