So two posts ago I spoke of continuing with Vista and just making it run how I want.
Yeah that thought changed again.
I'm typing this from the comfortable, reasonably easy-to-use and rather excellent Ubuntu KNOME platform. I was at work one day and saw a fellow classmate loading what "looked" like OSX on a Gateway machine, but lo and behold after questioning such an atrocity it turns out she was running Linux Ubuntu with a few hacks.
I pulled out the trusty Seagate external HDD and threw Ubuntu on there, no literally, threw. I got it up and running in about 10 minutes. The only thing was Grub (the boot loader for Linux) h ad been installed onto the external HDD, so the only way to boot Vista from the local HDD was to plug it in so it would read Ubuntu. This was remedied last week when I bit the bullet and partitioned my drive, giving Ubuntu 40gigs of space to steal. So now I have a dual-boot machine: Ubuntu 7.10 and Epic Fail (aka Vista).
The biggest problems I had were making sure all my random Windows programs still worked, aka Adobe CS3, Max's HTML Beauty, WoW (not really), etc etc. The best thing about Linux is WINE, which is a Windows emulator. I could even use this on a sole Linux machine to install and run Windows programs. Chuck Yeagar's Air Combat here I come. Unfortunately, CS3 is not *yet* supported by WINE, but will run CS2 and earlier perfectly. I think I'll wait until WINE gets an update and just run CS3 from the Vista side for now.
There are SO MANY programs for Linux, mostly free and open-source, the way it should be. Firefox comes pre-installed, as well as OpenOffice, which is an excellent alternative to MS Office. I've been running OpenOffice on my Vista and XP machines for a few years. Favorite programs are: WINE (of course), Rhythmboc Music Player (which feels similar to iTunes), KNotes (think Stickies on OSX), Picasa (which is a Google product also available for the PC and Mac, think iPhoto), Pidgin (Trillian or Adium-like but faster and cleaner) and the aforementioned OpenOffice. Another nice app is VMWare, though it's not free. VMWare is basically Parallels for Linux, except not a beta program, and it actually works. I'm having trouble getting it to work with Vista since I have an earlier version but the newest version should work fine. VMWare lets you run a virtual desktop of almost any other OS (except Mac of course) ie: WinXP, 2000, NT, Vista and another Linux install.
So, if you have some free time and want to check out something cool, dust off that old Dell that was running ME 6 years ago and throw Linux on it. It just works, and makes me happy. I didn't have to install any other drivers (except some proprietary graphics drivers, go Intel), the Logitech Wireless Music System works with no extra applications and there's really no need for an anti-virus.
Adam demands this.
Oh and this would be amazing, it better be for AT&T.
Go penguin.
- Redd
Yeah that thought changed again.
I'm typing this from the comfortable, reasonably easy-to-use and rather excellent Ubuntu KNOME platform. I was at work one day and saw a fellow classmate loading what "looked" like OSX on a Gateway machine, but lo and behold after questioning such an atrocity it turns out she was running Linux Ubuntu with a few hacks.
I pulled out the trusty Seagate external HDD and threw Ubuntu on there, no literally, threw. I got it up and running in about 10 minutes. The only thing was Grub (the boot loader for Linux) h ad been installed onto the external HDD, so the only way to boot Vista from the local HDD was to plug it in so it would read Ubuntu. This was remedied last week when I bit the bullet and partitioned my drive, giving Ubuntu 40gigs of space to steal. So now I have a dual-boot machine: Ubuntu 7.10 and Epic Fail (aka Vista).
The biggest problems I had were making sure all my random Windows programs still worked, aka Adobe CS3, Max's HTML Beauty, WoW (not really), etc etc. The best thing about Linux is WINE, which is a Windows emulator. I could even use this on a sole Linux machine to install and run Windows programs. Chuck Yeagar's Air Combat here I come. Unfortunately, CS3 is not *yet* supported by WINE, but will run CS2 and earlier perfectly. I think I'll wait until WINE gets an update and just run CS3 from the Vista side for now.
There are SO MANY programs for Linux, mostly free and open-source, the way it should be. Firefox comes pre-installed, as well as OpenOffice, which is an excellent alternative to MS Office. I've been running OpenOffice on my Vista and XP machines for a few years. Favorite programs are: WINE (of course), Rhythmboc Music Player (which feels similar to iTunes), KNotes (think Stickies on OSX), Picasa (which is a Google product also available for the PC and Mac, think iPhoto), Pidgin (Trillian or Adium-like but faster and cleaner) and the aforementioned OpenOffice. Another nice app is VMWare, though it's not free. VMWare is basically Parallels for Linux, except not a beta program, and it actually works. I'm having trouble getting it to work with Vista since I have an earlier version but the newest version should work fine. VMWare lets you run a virtual desktop of almost any other OS (except Mac of course) ie: WinXP, 2000, NT, Vista and another Linux install.
So, if you have some free time and want to check out something cool, dust off that old Dell that was running ME 6 years ago and throw Linux on it. It just works, and makes me happy. I didn't have to install any other drivers (except some proprietary graphics drivers, go Intel), the Logitech Wireless Music System works with no extra applications and there's really no need for an anti-virus.
Adam demands this.
Oh and this would be amazing, it better be for AT&T.
Go penguin.
- Redd
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