Living With Linux…Again
April 12
Hey all. First off, I want a way to show more than just the Blather articles here on the front page. I can’t decide how to do it, though. I feel like you guys need to know when I update Music, even though it’s usually every Sunday and as grown, responsible adults you should be able to remember that on your own. Anyway, if you have a suggestion, let me know, thanks.
This past weekend and this week have seen me exploring the world of Linux again. Of course, it wasn’t that simple…
I bought a wireless card for my Linux box. Got a good deal on it, too. I forget to make sure it would work with Linux, though. Yeah, yeah, I know. I should do research FIRST. Anyway, thinking it was more important to use the card than to use the computer, I deleted Linux and installed (shudder) Windows.
The card worked great! Fast connection, better than my iBook even. But I was running Windows. I had been over 2 years without that rickety OS and I didn’t really like the feeling of being back on such unstable ground.
Ray and I were talking one night. He was saying he wanted to get back into Linux ’cause he’d never picked it up all the way and I was thinking that myself as as way to get rid of Redmond’s influence. Ray stumbled across Ubuntu somehow. I had seen the distribution floating around the Linux world before, but had never given it a second thought, being faithful to my old distro.
One of the awesome things about Ubuntu (besides running a good kernel, Gnome, and being Debian based, and damn fun to say) is that they’ll mail CDs to you. I know, I know, with high-speed internet and CD burners on the cheap that’s kind of a moot feature, but it’s pretty unique in any case. I signed up for two i386 and two PPC copies (I have family interested in Linux that can use ‘em). They haven’t arrived yet and I was a bit anxious once Ray had his download installed and running, so I snagged a copy of it for myself and installed on Sunday.
The install was perfect. Took me about an hour total to go from Windows to Linux with no real hiccups. I’ve been working on getting the Mac to play nicely with it for the last few days and it’s almost there. I can connect through SSH and FTP and the Linux box is running an install of Apache and MySQL (and PHP of course). VNC seems to be working, too, so all I’m missing is direct disc mounting through Samba or AppleTalk. I’m happy with FTP most of the time, though, so I’m not too worried about it.
I know that was all a bunch of gobbledy-gook to many of you, but it’s very satisfying to get my system back up and running. Anyone else out there had such experiences with Linux?
I was once a big time advocate of linux not too long ago. I dislike running Windows, but for the time being, it does all that I need it to.
I remember trying out Ubuntu when it was still under the name Gnoppix. It was still a LiveCD then. It was pretty good, but it didn’t blow me away. So I went back to Debian Sarge. That was back in January, as far as I can recall. I’m actually interested in going back to Linux sooner or later, but I doubt I’ll do it before the end of the summer. I’ll have to check Ubuntu out again.
Brit Mckay on April 13, 2005 at 12:25 pm
Brit, I too run Windows on my newer computer and at work. But I’ve installed Ubuntu on my older computer and I really like it. That’s saying a lot. I’ve used Windows for years and never even thought of trying Linux until I met Kenneth. I gave Mepis a try and wasn’t overly thrilled with it. I was overwhelmed with all the new commands I had to learn. Ubuntu seems to be completely different than that. It has a neat program called Synaptic (I believe) that helps you find and install programs. Give it a try.
Kenneth, why don’t you tell them your WONDERFUL story about your experience installing Windows? This just might push Brit over the edge! :)
Ray on April 14, 2005 at 12:20 pm
Synaptic is a generic Debian-based program, btw, Ray. Any distro that can use apt-get can use Synaptic.
The story Ray’s talking about is that Windows and Linux label drives differently, Linux on the intelligent side. Two HDs plus a CDRW. Second HD is slaved to the CDRW due to size limitations. In Linux you have HDA, HDC (the CDRW), and HDD (slaved drive). Windows turns that around. Makes HDD into Drive 0 and HDA into Drive 1 (for some God-forsaken reason), so in formatting what looked to be HDA, I lost some 30 gb of MP3s and other stuff…
Stupid Microsoft can’t even count, much less let you mount and explore the drive before formatting it.
Kenneth on April 14, 2005 at 2:46 pm
Ouch. I have had a similar experience when I was installing Gentoo. I wiped both drives completely… just so that I could conform with the partitioning example presented in the handbook. It was very stupid move on my half, but I did it anyway. After that, for about four months, I ran Lunix (joke between friends) alone without a trace of WinXP anywhere to be found. It was fun having Photoshop7 running in Debian, albeit slow. Either way, when i get back into Linux, I’ll check out Ubuntu most definitely.
Thanks, guys.
PS.
You’ve been bookmarked. :)
Brit Mckay on April 15, 2005 at 9:33 am