Linux desktop attempt

[johnridley]

Yes, I guess it's that time again. Once in a while I like to see where Linux is. This time was probably brought about by reading Little Brother, though it's been due anyway.

Actually, it's going quite well. Ubuntu 9.10 is behaving quite well and I haven't found much that is really a problem. So far most everything I do day-to-day is covered, and the OS is pretty nice feeling.

There's a bug in the latest WINE that means I can't get Photoshop installed, but that's OK because my Epson scanner isn't supported either (Epson refuses to either write a driver or release specs). Since I need a virtual machine to log in to work anyway, I installed VirtualBox and a copy of XP in that. I'll see if I can get the scanner running there. It's supposed to work but I've never tried to get a USB device running in a VirtualBox client OS.

I'm running a few other Windows apps under WINE and they work very well. I will be trying my astronomy software soon; that's another one that's irreplaceable, but if it doesn't like WINE it can just go into the XP box.

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is giving me a good feeling that I hadn't felt up to now. The best I could describe it is that with previous versions of Linux, I got a feeling of alienness, that the OS really didn't belong there, that somehow it was just shoehorned in. Karmic installed incredibly smoothly and felt "right" all along. I don't know what exactly caused that feeling.

Comments

[jvanhare.livejournal.com]

Hence karmic koala, good karma, warm and fuzzy! I have been running it on my B130 Dell notebook
no problems, although I did a release upgrade from 9.04. Not sure if I like the Software Center, feels like less
control somehow. I don't expect you will have many issues on a desktop install. Notebooks always were
slightly more challenging. Since mine was an upgrade it is still ext3. I am guessing ext4 is the default on install now
and you may be slightly better off with that. I also retained my nm cfg files on the upgrade and didn't even need to
put my password back in to reconnect to my wireless network. I stll have netbook remix 9.04 on the Dell mini so I can't comment
on how good of a job they did on the new 9.10 UNR version. Not enough space and haven't copied my personal files off it yet to do a fresh install. Runs so good, I may not bother. Ubuntu works, the down side is you need a more powerful machine than say Slackware, but computers are getting so cheap these days that is kind of a non-issue, unless you''re cheap like me of course.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yes, ext4 standard.

This is a brand new desktop, Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM. I intentionally bought parts to build absolutely as "standard" of a machine as I could - nothing cheap, second rate or from a company that doesn't support stuff. I could run OS X retail unmodified (except for a USB config key) if I wanted to.

Copy those files off anyway, you never know when a hard drive will fail.

[jvanhare.livejournal.com]

Well it has an 8 gig flash drive but point taken :)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I trust flash drives even less. When they fail, they just stop working, and you're utterly boned. Hard drives almost always give some warning.