From Windows Vista to Ubuntu 7.04
I finally made the switch. I reloaded my Dell E521 with Ubuntu 7.04 this weekend. After poking around to make sure there were enough rocks in place for me to tip-toe across the river of change, I went for it. I loaded up Automatix, all the Google goodies, VMware Server, some assorted tools such as Floola (iTunes replacement), Pan (newsreader), and finally, the nVidia restricted drivers for Linux (to support my GeForce 7300 card).
So far, it’s all good.
Some interesting bumps along the way though, which I can work around for now…
- The NTFS daemon that comes with Automatix works as described, however, there seems to be some translation overhead that interferes with VMware if I try to use the 2nd hard drive (formatted NTFS) as my guest machine storage point. It reads fine, but simply crashes out if I try to launch a VM from it. I can create new VM’s and it makes all the files, but something happens at runtime that simply kills VMware when I try to launch it, even if it’s not been setup yet. Once I moved the guests back to my system drive, all is well. I will probably wipe and reload the 2nd drive with ext3 to make things smoother.
- Floola is very nice, in some ways nicer than iTunes. However, it has some quirks with double-downloads on podcasts, and fails to eject my iPod when quiting and pressing Shift at the same time (as it says to do). I can still eject from the desktop shortcut though.
- Picasa for Linux. Google finally posted it in their Google Labs section. It works nice, but I logged a complaint that the entire folder structure shown in any of the “Folder” dialog forms is all Windows-based. Things like “My Documents”, “My Pictures”, etc. Stooopid! Makes no sense for Linux at all. I’m guessing (hoping) it was simply an oversight and not intentional.
One interesting experience I have to share is regarding the installation of VMware Server 1.0.3. Until now, I’ve always gone to VMware and downloaded the TAR source and done the brute-force install. That’s usually worked, but I’ve always had to tweak and load and so forth. Low and behold, I stumbled across something I should have seen before: Synaptics Package Manager. It has a pre-built VMware Server 1.0.3 package, and it loads the required kernel modules. And guess what else? It works! I tested it three times, twice inside VM machines and once on my physical machine. No problems at all. So, I have to ask Linux users why is that on all the discussion forums, blogs, etc. they suffer with doing the source install, but nobody every suggests using the ready-made packages? Hmmm. I’d scratch my head, but it’s a little sun burnt today.
I still have more things to tweak before I can say my new desktop is equivalent to (or better than) my former Vista setup. However, I’m happy with what progress I’ve made so far.
May 29th, 2007 23:47
Welcome, the nicest thing, imo, about GNU?Linux is how _fast_ it all improves.
Welcome aboard, now you really can answer the question, “where do _you_ want to go today.
A great GPL alternative to VMWare Server is VirtualBox, available in Automatix.
May 30th, 2007 00:06
Welcome to the world of Linux. I am glad to hear that you are enjoying Ubuntu. I started using Linux a few months ago. I tried Ubuntu first on an old 450Mhz Pentium 2 pc with 192 megs of ram. I didnt really like Ubuntu myself so I let my 8 year old daughter play with it. My favorite PC is a Dell inspiron 1150 2.5 Ghz processor with 512 megs of ram. I tried Mepis 6.0 dual booting with XP on it. When Mepis 6.5 came out. I installed it as the only OS on this machine. Great operating system and you can install lots of KDE eyecandy on it. Anyway I forgot my root password on the Ubuntu machine, so it is now running Kubuntu 7.04 on it. Lots of nice eyecandy with the latest version of KDE also. Kubuntu is not as easy to tweak as Mepis but it is still a very nice OS. Oh yeah, my 8 year old likes the eyecandy also. I even managed through using Samba to network my linux machines with my XP desktop. Now the XP machine doubles as a fileserver. Looks like it will be keeping XP installed since I still need MS and IE for some work related things. Next project is a big hard drive for the XP desktop and to install a linux server on it.
May 30th, 2007 06:33
warner: “A great GPL alternative to VMWare Server is VirtualBox, available in Automatix.”
I just saw that after the latest update for Automatix installed. Thanks for reminding me to check it out!
May 30th, 2007 06:37
John: I actually swapped out my kids PC with another loaded with Ubuntu 7 back in March. They bitched for about a day, then went totally silent about it. They continued using it though, without saying a word (neither did I). After two weeks I swapped it back with their Vista box. They bitched and wanted Linux back. They’ve outgrown using CD-based games, so the games they use now are all Java or Flash-based on the web (runescape, club pengiun, etc.) Actually crashes less on Firefox (on Ubuntu) than in IE on Vista. I had to use the Ubuntu box for more testing before I rolled my Vista box. However, I may still swap theirs back to Ubuntu soon. They’re going to hate me for playing tricks with them but it’s kind of fun.