Only Page 3 in a Google Search?

Fresh on the heels of yesterday's (well, this morning's) Ubuntu installation, I gave our son a quick rundown of how to logon, and let him play with the system for a while. This latest release of Linux has come a long way since the last release I tried, Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) was released at the end of 2007. To be honest, I liked that distro, but I did not have at that time the patience or tenacity to stick with it long enough to learn much about it. My first impression of Quantal Quetzal 12.10 is that it is so vastly improved that the two releases hardly seem related. Mind you, I didn't do much "under the hood" with 7.10.

Today, though, our son, having never touched Linux before, successfully downloaded and installed Valve's Steam client without a hitch (Ubuntu had no issues with getting online). After that, I spent about an hour trying to get sound to work, which seems to be an ever-present issue when doing a fresh OS install. This time, though, it was strictly a hardware issue- I has the speakers plugged in to the onboard PC sound, but no sound. I tried several tests, and even looked online... which is where page 3 in a Google search happens. If one just enters quetzal, Google serves up the bird, a Grammy-winning musical group in Los Angeles, another artiste that lives somewhere in Spain (yes, that was the actual listing... somewhere) and a few other things before Linux shows up. I searched something like "Ubuntu sound issues" and got a number of hits.

Left to right, XP, Win7, Ubuntu 

I was happy to see this!

I went back to the PC and tried the last port of possibility, the soundcard. It worked. Wow. I can only guess that the OS detected the card and wanted me to use it rather than the built in sound. The other challenge I was not looking forward to was installing a printer. This, however, was the anticlimactic moment of my evening. I selected printers, the PC found the networked printers, and I picked one. I think I executed maybe five mouse clicks, including the printer test, shown to the right. I am truly impressed, although I think I will get one of those 900-page books because I want to do some actual work on this box. I still do not know how to do much with the external HDD, and this is important as the internal one is fairly small. Well, I was able to create two folders, but unable to "execute permissions" to install the one game- Red Orchestra- that I have that has been ported to Steam. I did locate a Dummies book published in 1997, but it wasn't any help, so I need the big book.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.