As anyone who uses Linux can testify theres been any number of problems ranging from driver conflicts to software conficts to a lack of a reasonable way to get done the work I do on a daily basis. There just hasn't been a way to do most of the things I need do with out jumping through a ton of hoops.

The good news is that I finally found a Linux distro that actually works out of the box for me: Ubunutu 7.10 Desktop. For the very, very first time I was able to get Exchange working in Linux using Evolution 2.12.0. There was absolutely zero configuration needed, I just popped in my credentials and the server address and it worked.

Thats amazing.

In fact, performance under Evo was better than Outlook. For reference I'm running Ubuntu on a dual processor Pentium 3 750 with 256 megs of ram and a 320g hard drive. The video card is a Riva 128 with 4 megs of ram. We're talking serious old school here, folks. Oh, i forgot to mention, with Evo and Firefox running I was using 192m of my 256m total ram. Wow!

And I'll say that it is completely usable for web surfing and email. Thats a miracle. Heck, I jumped on Youtube and after installing flash (point and click, nothing hard) I was watching a video.

Shoot, this old box doesn't even have a working sound card or speakers. Yet, the pc speaker inside (you know it from the beep when you reboot) was putting out impressive sound.

So, here's to the continued development of Linux. And, see if you can turn up the heat on the boys in Redmond just a little more, will ya?

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