Patience is a virtue, or so they say.

A while back, at my urging him to, my father ordered a new Dell Mini 9. Being such a nice guy, he ordered one for me as well. I’ve really, really been looking forward to getting it and doing fun things like trying out Windows 7 (supposedly runs quite nice on the hardware) and OS X (shh! don’t tell anyone!).

However, the consumer division at Dell seems to have some deficiencies, and these two machines, ordered a month ago, were cancelled. Thus began the customer service fun.

Fast-forward to me putting a call into our corporate sales rep through my job, and voila! The ordered is restored and back on track. But seriously….. APRIL 28? It seems so far away.

We actually ordered these two machines with Windows XP, because we didn’t have a choice with the promotion that they were running. No big deal since Ubuntu, the other OS offered, is open source and free.

Not having the patience to wait for the mini, I decided to try Ubuntu out. And rather than use my home machine – I made my work laptop the guinea pig. I think this is acceptable under the premise of testing our company website development on other platforms.

Setup was a breeze – the hairy part was carving out a partition on my existing hard-drive. For that I turned to the toolset from Paragon. I should have first checked the clock, because I decided to do it about 5 minutes before leaving work, so I was stuck for another hour.

The Ubuntu installation is a breeze. I loved the fact that the installer loads the entire OS in memory to let you test drive it and then click install.

The only other difficult step was in choosing the partition for Ubuntu to go on. The install gives a couple of options – overwrite existing, use the largest unallocated free space, or manually establish your partitions. Option 1 was out, and Option 2 I just didn’t trust – the visual indicator of the current disk showed it was going to do the same as Option 1.

So, “Manual” was the way to go. I created a swap partition and then the Linux partition. Install took no time at all, and I quickly booted into Ubuntu (only take about 1.8gb of the 4gb partition).

From there, I didn’t really have to do anything else. No issues with any drivers whatsoever, including wireless network adapters. I did have to do some tweaking to get java installed, but once that was done, I was able to successfully connect to my work VPN through Juniper Network Connect and easily remote into any of my Windows 2003 servers using the Ubuntu Terminal Services client.

So what’s the verdict?

I…kind of… love… it. I never thought I would. But, it’s an elegant, light-weight, very fast booting, practical operating system. I’ve found myself booting Ubuntu every time I just want to do some simple web browsing and reading.

So will I stick with it when my Mini arrives? Hard to say, but I can tell you this much. I won’t even bother booting it up to Windows XP. I’ll probably install Windows 7 immediately, then install Ubuntu onto another small partition.

Oh, the choices…the choices….