I’d written a blog post about setting up my laptop as a Dual Boot with Vista and Ubuntu. I thought I’d written a blog post on how to get Vista to suck less by XP-ifiy it. Turn off UAC (User Account Control) and that’ll make it far less annoying. I chose not to remove Vista and install XP because I was afraid I’d have problems finding drivers for the laptop. On to installing SP1.
Installing SP1
I installed Vista SP1 on my laptop tonight. Given Microsoft’s track record, I decided to hold off on it until I’d done some research. Basically, as long as I was careful I was OK. I couldn’t really get a sense if I really needed it not. What I read made me lean towards it. I did back up my important files first. I downloaded it and got ready to install it when I realized that my laptop was dual boot with Ubuntu. So I did a quick search to see if that was safe. It appeared to be. Some blogs and reviews said it broke programs, but these reviews and blog posts were shortly after SP1 was released.
On the Ubuntu forums, people refer to an article that says unless you have Vista Ultimate or Vista Enterprise installing SP1 shouldn’t cause a problem.
Reflections
I installed Hardy Heron and I’ve kept current with updates, so I’m currently running kernel 2.26.24-22. Although I’ve had problems with WiFi on Linux my experience with a dual boot laptop has been pretty trouble free. But as someone whose had headaches with Windows and Linux (mostly Windows), I am careful when I do upgrades. When I was a Mac user I was always on the bleeding edge and installing and upgrading to betas. I didn’t make the transition to Mac OS X. When I switched to the Windows universe I did the opposite. I waited until all the bugs and problems were worked out of Windows upgrades before following suit.
I’ve used Linux off and on over the years. My first distribution was Slackware then I switched to RedHat shortly thereafter. After a long absence I went back to using Red Hat which had become Fedora. When I went to Pycon 2007 I saw a lot of laptops running Ubuntu. I gave it a try but didn’t like it at first. I didn’t grok sudo and hated it. I do now, and I grok it.