El Mundo Libre

I like the TomTom ONE. The nice lady in the little box was very patient with us on our trip to the south of France. She missed a couple of gas stations here and there, but hey, how many of us can really say they know every point of interest from Antwerp to Toulouse? Exactly.

And she continued being helpful after I came back. My navigational skills are practically non-existent so it's nice to have someone point directions whenever a friend of a friend needs a help desk.

But that's not even the best thing. The real cool-factor is that it runs on good ol' Linux. Wait, there's more: with a little help of some GPL magic the source code is available for everyone (yes, that means you too) to download, modify and redistribute. There's no denying it, libre software rocks!

I want to make one thing clear first: I don't like Medion. My brother bought this laptop in the local super market because at the time it was hyped as a once in a lifetime offer with super-duper features and a whole pile of software. And indeed it came with a lot of software, although most of it is on a special "Application Disc" and of course none of it is Libre. For the operating system I can understand that it's only a Windows XP Home Edition. But what I really hate is that they ship it not as a regular CD-ROM, but as a "Recovery Disc". So all the more reason to install something else on it.

I'll write this as a kind of step by step guide with some tips for Dutch speaking users. I hope this will lower the barrier for some people to start using Ubuntu themselves. So let's get crackin'.