A Brief Historical Background (Or, Why Linux?)

My father is a computer engineer, so I grew up around several different predominately PC-based computers and have witnessed every stage in the development of Windows. We had a few different Macs sitting around the house as well, which were neat because they were different and easy to use, but all the cool games could only be played on the PCs. I have a vague memory of seeing a weird computer in my father’s office that started up with “OK” written in green on every line, but couldn’t make it work at the time ;-)

Note: This article is part of my OS Install Experiences series.

Next OS — the recently released Debian-derived distribution Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake).

I’ve built Ubuntu Dapper Epiphany 1.9 and Firefox 1.4.99 packages for Ubuntu Breezy. I’ve also enabled the Epiphany Adblock extension which seems to work fine. You can’t specify your own advert signatures with a GUI yet (afaikt) but the built-in database seems to cover most bases.

I’ve only built for i386 as that’s all I need it for right now. Tbh, it’s really not that difficult to build you own, but here they are anyway:
UPDATE: I’ve setup an apt repository for all this nonsense.

deb http://johnleach.co.uk/downloads/ubuntu breezy backports

I don’t really have plans to keep this up to date, but I might expand it to a few other packages I want to play with, so feel free to use.