Can you live Free?
With prices on EVERYTHING going well beyond affordable, I have been thinking lately about how to save money and ways to spend less. So I came up with an idea. Can you truly live free on a computer. What I mean is, can you live your daily life on a PC with an entire system that is either Open Source or freeware software?
The first problem of course is obtaining a computer for free. Of course this is a little bit of a problem, but at the moment, we’ll over look that. In this experiment, I am going to use a 12″ PowerPC Mac Powerbook. I already have it and don’t use it so it makes a perfect candidate for this experiment.
We are going to start off with the Operating System. All commercial operating systems cost money. Of course you get the latest version when you buy a new computer, but that license cost is included in the price of the computer. Then after a while, a new version of the OS comes out and you have to pay more money for that upgrade. Hence the problem, we are spending money to upgrade to the latest and greatest. That just won’t work!
So we are going to look at Open Source Operating Systems. The best open Source OS out there is of course Linux. Mac OSX is based on a flavor of linux so we know we have to be looking at something worth while if apple uses it! There are many, MANY flavors of Linux out there. After doing a little bit of searching on linux.org, I found a distrbution that will work on a PowerPC mac, Ubuntu.
While there are many different versions of Ubuntu, we are going to focus on switching from a main stream OS to an Oen Source OS for the masses. Meaning, any one that wants to “live free” can do this. So rather then looking at using a server based distro, we are going to look at a desktop or end user ditro called Ubuntu Desktop Edition. This should be a good replacement for almost any main stream OS out there. So take a look and see if this is something you might liek to try. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll review how the installation went and first thoughts on the begining of Living Free!