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.

I had to sell my kayak last year in order to make a bill payment.  That’s life.  But I still miss paddling on the water around here.  Virginia Beach and the surrounding area is like an artery system of waterways, creeks, rivers, lakes, ponds, and the wide open Atlantic ocean.  A really great site, probably the best site, for getting a broad, yet focused cross-section of kayaking around here is KayakVB.com.  The Trip Reports section is always good.  The links to gear, info, clubs, and launch sites is fantastic, especially if you’re interested in kayaking.  Even if you’re not, check it out.

After having watched it more than a dozen times, most recently yesterday, I am still convinced that Team America: World Police is the masterpiece of masterpieces of cinematography. Yes, it’s true. If you haven’t seen it yet, you are truly missing out on one of the worlds most wonderful film treasures. In fact, I reviewed it after first watching it. I had to say that since I just finished watching the end of it a few minutes ago.

I figured out how to solve three problems with one invention!

Problems:

1. Green-friendly transportation
2. Reduced DUI incidents
3. Reduced traffic congestion

How?

Breath-powered turbine cars!  That’s right.  You blow into a breathalizer which connects to a turbine which in turn runs a gearbox to run the contraption to the end of your driveway, where you ultimately pass out from hyperventilation.  Traffic stops at the end of each driveway.  Problems solved.

…to switching to Ubuntu.  In addition to finding Floola, a very nice iTunes replacement, I tried out Pan again, but this time I installed the latest beta build.  It’s closer to Newsbin Pro, very close.  However, it doesn’t look like it has the features in Newsbin 5.34.  I still can’t find a decent substitute for QuickPar either.

All I need now is something to replace NeroVision (for burning DVD movies), something to convert DivX/AVI files to MP4 for my iPod, and maybe something to deal with Google’s Picasa, which I just started using.  I see Google posted a Linux version of that also.   I’ve been using PSP Video 9 for converting video files, but I’m open to anything that (a) works well, and (b) is pretty to look at.