I work in Building 2 on the 4th floor of BEA's Corporate offices. I had moved into a new office, when I noticed a box of CDs on the filing cabinet near my office. They were CDs of Ubuntu, a Linux distribution. "Just what the world needs, another Linux distro", I thought to myself. Eight months later, I began to read more about Ubuntu, and wanted to try it out. The articles suggested it was a slick desktop experience and an easy installation process. By this time, the CDs were gone (I think I threw them out). So, I went to their site and downloaded their distro as an ISO and burned a CD.

 One of the first things you notice is that you can boot off the CD and it works pretty well, if a but slowly. The second thing is that the install is pretty easy. Its still a bit scary since it involves hard drive partitioning, which is a black art, but if you have a system you can blow away, its very easy when you let Ubuntu do the provisioning for you. My favorite part of the Live CD version of Ubuntu is the MPEG of Nelson Mandela explaining what Ubuntu means.

 The Out of the Box experience was amazing. It looks great. This is in part due to the graphics and polish of the system, and also to GNOME, of which I am an unabashed fan.

 I wanted to try an real application with it, so I download BEA Workshop Studio, of course. I needed a little bit of help from superstar Ram V, but was able to install it. One of the problems is that the installer is expecting a RedHat like OS, when in fact, Ubuntu is Debian-based. All I had to do was to use the LAX_VM switch, like this:

 WorkshopInstaller.bin LAX_VM /home/broth/jrockit/bin/java