Black On Stuff

For months I was feeling the need to change something on my home computer. And not in terms of hardware but in terms of the operating system. I’m a Windows user for years; I loved Win2000 and only went to XP when I had to change my hard-drive. Doing some research, I decided that Ubuntu is a Linux flavor that might work for me, it had everything a Windows users should expect.

So I have installed it in a virtual machine first using VMWare. Smooth installation, it didn’t seem to take too much memory on my computer. I had only one problem: network connection, since I wanted to share my XP connection and not connecting directly to the router. Here is how it worked for me: start the “Set up a home or small office network”, follow the wizard and share the internet connection. Then go to Ubuntu to network settings and add the gateway the Win XP local IP address and DNS the DNS addresses already set up on Windows (from provider). Then configure the firewall on the Windows computer to accept remote connections from the virtual machine. That’s it. First time in my life when I played with the Win XP internet connection sharing.

Anyway, having internet connectivity on Ubuntu was a success, so I was able to download the appropriate codecs for playing mp3 and divx files. Office tools were already there (Open Office).

Finally, I have decided to go forward and install Ubuntu directly on my system and not in the virtual machine. So I partitioned my hard-drive, did it by the book with a separate 2GB swap partition. My friends recommended Kubuntu, so I went for this. The installation was pretty straight forward, I love especially the Live CD where you can “try before install” the basic OS features. I was amazed that after installation I even had my internet connection ready, without doing anything. That’s neat.

But, being used with XP, I was expecting the same font smoothness and at least the same speed. Activating features like transparency made the system work quite in re-run. Opening applications took more than on my XP. And I’m not talking about a slow system, it’s a P4 3GHz with 1GB RAM.

Using the software repositories (both Universe and Multiverse) is like having an indexed download portal at your fingertips. This is nice and Windows does not have that.

Trying to figure out how to use the second monitor made me switch back to Windows. From what I understood searching the web/forums, this is still a problem in Linux in general. Also, I wasn’t able to start my digital TV Tuner and I’m not willing to continue without having the same comfort as in XP.

My conclusion: it’s worth trying a Linux OS, you can clearly see the evolution in the last years. But for productivity reasons, if you’re used with another system you should stick there, otherwise you might end us searching for buttons or icons that you don’t have. It is for sure a step toward Microsoft-Independence that could take a time to make it. And a lot of patience. I wonder what the future will bring, now that Vista is out and MS went into the graphical and productivity zone.