LAUNCHED seven days after Windows 7, Ubuntu 9.10 is an excellent alternative to Microsoft’s new and more expensive operating system.

Also known as Karmic Koala, this upgrade to the popular Linux distribution has everything you’d expect from a modern operating system—and more.

Like Windows 7, Karmic Koala is easy to install. Just download it free from the Ubuntu Web site (www.ubuntu.com), burn it on a CD, then boot from the installer disc you’ve created.

Unlike Windows 7 (which retails for between P8,000 and P16,500 for the full version), Ubuntu is absolutely free and comes with loads of software already installed, including OpenOffice, a complete productivity suite that’s comparable with MS Office. And if you don’t see what you need, browse through the Ubuntu Software Center and download the programs you want for free.

Installing Ubuntu 9.10 from the CD took me about 40 minutes on a desktop PC. Unlike the previous release (Jaunty Jackalope), Karmic didn’t keep me waiting interminably for an online update. A “skip” button enables you to bypass some processes that access the Internet to speed up installation.

Boot time was a slight improvement over my previous Jaunty setup, taking about 40 seconds to get to the log-on screen. On the initial boot, the audio volume was set all the way down to zero, making me think for a moment that I had lost sound. Pushing the volume slider up confirmed this was not so.

As I experienced with Windows 7, Karmic didn’t immediately install the correct driver for my graphics card and defaulted to an awful 800 x 600 screen.

To complicate matters, the restricted driver that Ubuntu offers to install isn’t the newest one, so it won’t give you the higher screen resolution you want.

Fortunately, Alberto Milone’s excellent EnvyNG utility (http://bit.ly/dK5eb) makes it easy to find and install the best driver for Nvidia or ATI cards. With the right driver installed, you can set the screen to a higher resolution and take advantage of the visual effects or eye candy that make Ubuntu such a pleasure to use. Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, should consider including EnvyNG in the next release. It would make life easier for a lot of users who have ATI or Nvidia graphics cards.

Two things impressed me right off the bat about Karmic.

First, it seems to have fixed a bug in Jaunty that slowed USB transfers to a crawl. Now I can copy files to and from a memory stick or an external hard drive without taking a coffee break.

Second, there is now a user-friendly way to install fonts. Simply right-click on a font file, view it with the Font Viewer, and click on the “Install” button. Nothing could be easier.

The Ubuntu Software Center is an improvement over the old Add/Remove Programs in all ways but one: it offers no easy way to install Microsoft Core Fonts (Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, and so on). You can find the package in the Software Center, but it will not let you install it; nor does it offer any help on how to find it.

Fortunately, help is just a Google search away. The easiest way to install the MS fonts at this point is to run Terminal, and copy and paste this one line:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

When prompted, simply type in your password to install the fonts.

This isn’t ideal, especially for novices, but the workaround isn’t too hard to do, either.

To complete my system, I used the Software Center to download a few more of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Mousepad, a text editor that I like more than Gedit, which is already installed.

• Gnote, a hypertext-enabled system of notes much like Tomboy.

• Audacious, my favorite Winamp look-alike, to play my music.

• VLC, my preferred video player.

• K3B, in my opinion the best CD and DVD burner for Linux.

• Deluge, a BitTorrent client that has more features than Transmission, which comes installed.

• Tellico, a database that I use to keep track of my audio CDs (yes I still buy them).

• Xara Xtreme, an extremely fast vector graphics editor.

• CheckGmail, an extremely useful utility that can check multiple Gmail accounts and alert you when new messages arrive.

Outside of Software Center, I also installed Skype, for free voice over IP, and Dropbox, a nifty service that gives me 2GB of free online storage that I can access as a folder on machines where I have the Dropbox client installed. Ubuntu One, which comes with Karmic Koala, works much the same way, but you can never have too much online storage.

There is a canard going around that bugs in Karmic Koala are turning off even experienced users. As proof, these writers and bloggers point to a survey on Ubuntu Forums that show only 18 percent of respondents reported a flawless installation. But reporting these results as being reflective of the whole universe of Ubuntu users is silly. After all, most people go to a forum to get help with a problem, so the sample is skewed from the get-go.

Karmic Koala took only 40 minutes to install, but I expect to spend hours tweaking it until I get it just the way I like it, and adding cool software for free. That’s not a problem; that’s part of the fun.

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