knalle
March 1st, 2006, 03:48 PM
Because of ongoing pressure and right out harassment from Linux Nerds, like my works BOFH and Linux Security Advisor for Lamers TV; Cato Saksvik, I have tried the following experiment; I made my Windows computer a dualboot (http://windows.about.com/cs/dualboot/) with Ubuntu Linux, and now I have set my self a test on now long it will take me to reboot to good old Windows.
I'm not going into how i installed (K)Ubuntu Linux because that was pretty easy, just slap in the cd and go. The only initial problems I had was to get my Nvidia 6800 going and, this Nvidia How to (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75074) from ubuntuforums.org helped me, later Cato called me a lamer and luser because I could just have installed Mepis Linux and written; “sudo nvidia-glx-config enable”. Thanks.
Anyway everything is up and running with Ubuntu Linux, so lets see how i survived the week:
Monday:
The first thing I did was to install the Mozilla Browser and used OpenOffice to write stuff for my blog, I don't care much for the Konqueror browser, but thats just old habit. After writing I posted to my lamers.tv and found the expected SSH and SFTP tools. But when I wanted to create a new XHTML page I got the first problem. I'm used to Macromedia Dreamweaver so what could replace it? Kate, Emacs, VIM and other text editors just don't cut it to day as development tools so i was pleasantly surprised when i found Quanta Plus (http://quanta.sourceforge.net/), a free web developer IDE for your KDE desktop.
Quanta Plus had all the tools I expected; A node driven project tree, remote synchronizing and SFTP support, plus it has a good editor with syntax highlighting for most known geekspeak like PHP, XHTML, CSS and Javascript. Together with The Gimp I found to have all the tools I needed to work remotely with my web development.
Tuesday:
Mia, a friend, came by and she wanted to secure backup some of my musical files, I haven't tried CD burning with this distro yet, so does K3B work? Yes like a charm, full speed burning and verifying with my NEC 3550A. No problems there.
Wednesday:
Cato, Lamers TV's Linux Security Advisor dropped by and after a while he was able to forgive me that i had installed Ubuntu Linux instead of Mepis Linux, an hour with biblical lectures about Mepis Linux later we decided to do a professional stress test of the system by installing and playing Enemy Territory (http://enemy-territory.4players.de:1041/) on the computer. The game runs OpenGL but since I had fixed my Nvidia driver the game ran smoothly. We're so professional!
Thursday:
Some new banners for Lamers TV required me to dive into The Gimp, after some hours I started to get a hang of the layers and the channels. I have been a payed Adobe Photoshop user for years so getting used to The Gimp took a while. But now I'm able to do many of the things I do in Photoshop like red eye removal and photo collages. And the nice thing is that I haven't yet found a format The Gimp cant read, even most of my old Photoshop files. Export and filters support in Gimp is also excellent. I mostly work in GIF, JPEG and PNG so I'm not much of a power user.
Friday:
More professionalism, in the evening Bård, Cato and Rune gathered up to play the weekly matches of StarCraft (http://www.blizzard.com/starcraft/), this posed the first real problem. How? After 60 minutes of hard tweaking of my WINE registry config I got StarCraft Broodwar running with sound and was ready to join the others on the LAN where they were waiting with their Windows XP running StarCraft ready machines.
Big grins, some mentioned the lame fact that if i had dualbooted back to Windows we could have save us a lot of time that I needed to get StarCraft running in Ubuntu Linux. But we got it all running and played happily for 3 hours before a kernel panic(?) killed my computer and I was kicked out of the game.
This was my first Ubuntu Linux crash but a major one, everything froze, and I had to reboot the computer with the power button while Bård and Rune was laughing and calling me and my Linux installation names. Owned!
Saturday:
Nothing special to report about, I took some pictures with my Canon Ixus and was seriously doubting that I would be able to get my photos over to my computer, but Ubuntu Linux found my SanDisk USB reader without installing drivers like I had to in Windows. Nice! The pictures was also easily arranged in my home folder with Konqueror and the fixed in Gimp if they were to dark, or had to red eyes etc. I also found a nice alternative to the IRC client in Mozilla, Konversation is a very nice IRC client with OSD and pop up notification! I'm starting to like this.
Sunday:
Second Ubuntu Linux crash, don't know what happened, I had Gimp, Konversation, about 20 Mozilla's, Quanta and Kaffeine running and was working when the damn computer froze on me again, no keyboard, no mouse, just freeze. Hm.... what is this?
I'm actually used to reboot my Windows weekly, so I expect the same from Linux, and I know it can be more stable than this, gotta investigate these freezes with some deep drilling of /var/log.
conclusion so far:
So far I've been a Ubuntu Linux user for about a month now, but I was dualbooting a lot because I simply didn't take the time to find the alternatives to the way I work in Windows. So far I've been very pleased, especially with Quanta Plus, I haven't rebooted to Windows for about 1 and a half week now.
Happy Hacking!
I'm not going into how i installed (K)Ubuntu Linux because that was pretty easy, just slap in the cd and go. The only initial problems I had was to get my Nvidia 6800 going and, this Nvidia How to (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75074) from ubuntuforums.org helped me, later Cato called me a lamer and luser because I could just have installed Mepis Linux and written; “sudo nvidia-glx-config enable”. Thanks.
Anyway everything is up and running with Ubuntu Linux, so lets see how i survived the week:
Monday:
The first thing I did was to install the Mozilla Browser and used OpenOffice to write stuff for my blog, I don't care much for the Konqueror browser, but thats just old habit. After writing I posted to my lamers.tv and found the expected SSH and SFTP tools. But when I wanted to create a new XHTML page I got the first problem. I'm used to Macromedia Dreamweaver so what could replace it? Kate, Emacs, VIM and other text editors just don't cut it to day as development tools so i was pleasantly surprised when i found Quanta Plus (http://quanta.sourceforge.net/), a free web developer IDE for your KDE desktop.
Quanta Plus had all the tools I expected; A node driven project tree, remote synchronizing and SFTP support, plus it has a good editor with syntax highlighting for most known geekspeak like PHP, XHTML, CSS and Javascript. Together with The Gimp I found to have all the tools I needed to work remotely with my web development.
Tuesday:
Mia, a friend, came by and she wanted to secure backup some of my musical files, I haven't tried CD burning with this distro yet, so does K3B work? Yes like a charm, full speed burning and verifying with my NEC 3550A. No problems there.
Wednesday:
Cato, Lamers TV's Linux Security Advisor dropped by and after a while he was able to forgive me that i had installed Ubuntu Linux instead of Mepis Linux, an hour with biblical lectures about Mepis Linux later we decided to do a professional stress test of the system by installing and playing Enemy Territory (http://enemy-territory.4players.de:1041/) on the computer. The game runs OpenGL but since I had fixed my Nvidia driver the game ran smoothly. We're so professional!
Thursday:
Some new banners for Lamers TV required me to dive into The Gimp, after some hours I started to get a hang of the layers and the channels. I have been a payed Adobe Photoshop user for years so getting used to The Gimp took a while. But now I'm able to do many of the things I do in Photoshop like red eye removal and photo collages. And the nice thing is that I haven't yet found a format The Gimp cant read, even most of my old Photoshop files. Export and filters support in Gimp is also excellent. I mostly work in GIF, JPEG and PNG so I'm not much of a power user.
Friday:
More professionalism, in the evening Bård, Cato and Rune gathered up to play the weekly matches of StarCraft (http://www.blizzard.com/starcraft/), this posed the first real problem. How? After 60 minutes of hard tweaking of my WINE registry config I got StarCraft Broodwar running with sound and was ready to join the others on the LAN where they were waiting with their Windows XP running StarCraft ready machines.
Big grins, some mentioned the lame fact that if i had dualbooted back to Windows we could have save us a lot of time that I needed to get StarCraft running in Ubuntu Linux. But we got it all running and played happily for 3 hours before a kernel panic(?) killed my computer and I was kicked out of the game.
This was my first Ubuntu Linux crash but a major one, everything froze, and I had to reboot the computer with the power button while Bård and Rune was laughing and calling me and my Linux installation names. Owned!
Saturday:
Nothing special to report about, I took some pictures with my Canon Ixus and was seriously doubting that I would be able to get my photos over to my computer, but Ubuntu Linux found my SanDisk USB reader without installing drivers like I had to in Windows. Nice! The pictures was also easily arranged in my home folder with Konqueror and the fixed in Gimp if they were to dark, or had to red eyes etc. I also found a nice alternative to the IRC client in Mozilla, Konversation is a very nice IRC client with OSD and pop up notification! I'm starting to like this.
Sunday:
Second Ubuntu Linux crash, don't know what happened, I had Gimp, Konversation, about 20 Mozilla's, Quanta and Kaffeine running and was working when the damn computer froze on me again, no keyboard, no mouse, just freeze. Hm.... what is this?
I'm actually used to reboot my Windows weekly, so I expect the same from Linux, and I know it can be more stable than this, gotta investigate these freezes with some deep drilling of /var/log.
conclusion so far:
So far I've been a Ubuntu Linux user for about a month now, but I was dualbooting a lot because I simply didn't take the time to find the alternatives to the way I work in Windows. So far I've been very pleased, especially with Quanta Plus, I haven't rebooted to Windows for about 1 and a half week now.
Happy Hacking!