But Why?
Having given it some thought over several weeks about wiping my hard disk and installing a Linux variant, I had just about decided on Ubuntu when I received a USB2 external disk and PCI card which I failed miserably to get working under Windows XP, no matter how much shuffling of existing cards and resources that I did.
Not good timing though, with the local Middlesbrough Mela a day away. I had previously shot all photos in NEF (Nikon's RAW file format) and had a workflow that was fairly quick and simple based around Google's Picasa.
Yet I am getting ahead of myself. Why would I want to do this, really I mean. I have a legit installation of XP Pro, but certain things frustrate me, its time for a change and I really want something I can extend myself with scripts, tools, etc. My software development skills have fallen out of date and it is time to get up to speed with some of the more recent developments of the last few years. I also want better integration, from my desktop, internet, 3G mobile, of all the tools I use, email, calendering, contacts, bookmarks, the whole shebang. Maybe its a pipe dream? With all my data backed up on my Fedora Core 4 Linux server, email exported and bookmarks consigned to the bin, it is time to take the plunge.
Ubuntu Linux
Downloading and burning a copy of Ubuntu Feisty is fairly easy and straight forward. Installing should have been - a minimal set of questions, going with the defaults for most things, but life wasnt that simple. The partitioning was done within minutes, but make filesystem sat and hung at 5%, grrrrr. Several attempts later, I gave up on ext3 and changed the settings for an ext2 filesystem. Damn it is slow to create the filesystem, if you are doing this - allow several hours.
The good news is that the sound drivers, network card, USB interfaces and external disks all worked straight off the bat.
Nvidia Graphics Drivers
Slight problem-ette - screen resolution is poor, the install didnt seem to recognise my Nvidia GeForce3 card. No amount of "sudo apt-get install" seemed to bear fruit, but the light at the end of the tunnel was AutoMatix - which installed and configured the drivers for me as "Restricted Drivers" - phew! Without a decent screen resolution it would have been goodbye Ubuntu.
Other applications
I followed a few blog entries from others and installed additional applications with the built in Add/Remove tool where the packages where I could - trying to follow the rules as much as possible. For the rest, I turned to AutoMatix. What did I want that wasnt in the default install? Hmmm, things like - Opera, gFTP, BloGTK, Vmware Server, GnuCash, MonoDevelop, MP3 player (including codecs), SAMBA (for sharing disks and printers with other Windows machines like the kids), etc.
Photo Manipulation Stuff
Having been to the Mela (did I mention the install took a while), I had a bunch of pictures to process and the available in tools were just way too slow and tedious to use. This is no different to XP, but on Windows, there was always Picasa. I grubbed around a little and discovered that Picasa runs under WINE, so I could have the best of both worlds. I installed both and lo and behold, performance is about on par with XP. Excellent.
And for more in depth RAW file manipulation - I could use GIMP which comes preinstalled - right - erm - wrong actually, yes it comes preinstalled, but by default it doesnt handle raw files. Something about Tiff file errors and unrecognized tags! More grubbing around yielded a write up of UFRAW and the GIMP plugin. A magic incantation at a command line (terminal window) of "sudo apt-get install gimp-ufraw" fixed the problem.
Conclusion
I had read reports of Ubuntu that said that finally here is a version of Linux that is ready for the mainstream. I beg to differ. It is probably fine if it comes preinstalled and you dont need any extra applications or you are prepared to read up alot and get your head around some of the techie stuff (or have someone else to do this for you), but I wouldnt recommend it to non techie friends - I would probably spend half my life getting it working for them. Most people will have specific uses for their PC, and I dont believe it is simple enough to configure for most users.
I also havent found any preinstalled AntiVirus solution, but ClamAV is meant to be good so I will give that a look.
For me, it looks like it might fit the bill, time will tell, but I will try and post updates here.
Having given it some thought over several weeks about wiping my hard disk and installing a Linux variant, I had just about decided on Ubuntu when I received a USB2 external disk and PCI card which I failed miserably to get working under Windows XP, no matter how much shuffling of existing cards and resources that I did.
Not good timing though, with the local Middlesbrough Mela a day away. I had previously shot all photos in NEF (Nikon's RAW file format) and had a workflow that was fairly quick and simple based around Google's Picasa.
Yet I am getting ahead of myself. Why would I want to do this, really I mean. I have a legit installation of XP Pro, but certain things frustrate me, its time for a change and I really want something I can extend myself with scripts, tools, etc. My software development skills have fallen out of date and it is time to get up to speed with some of the more recent developments of the last few years. I also want better integration, from my desktop, internet, 3G mobile, of all the tools I use, email, calendering, contacts, bookmarks, the whole shebang. Maybe its a pipe dream? With all my data backed up on my Fedora Core 4 Linux server, email exported and bookmarks consigned to the bin, it is time to take the plunge.
Ubuntu Linux
Downloading and burning a copy of Ubuntu Feisty is fairly easy and straight forward. Installing should have been - a minimal set of questions, going with the defaults for most things, but life wasnt that simple. The partitioning was done within minutes, but make filesystem sat and hung at 5%, grrrrr. Several attempts later, I gave up on ext3 and changed the settings for an ext2 filesystem. Damn it is slow to create the filesystem, if you are doing this - allow several hours.
The good news is that the sound drivers, network card, USB interfaces and external disks all worked straight off the bat.
Nvidia Graphics Drivers
Slight problem-ette - screen resolution is poor, the install didnt seem to recognise my Nvidia GeForce3 card. No amount of "sudo apt-get install" seemed to bear fruit, but the light at the end of the tunnel was AutoMatix - which installed and configured the drivers for me as "Restricted Drivers" - phew! Without a decent screen resolution it would have been goodbye Ubuntu.
Other applications
I followed a few blog entries from others and installed additional applications with the built in Add/Remove tool where the packages where I could - trying to follow the rules as much as possible. For the rest, I turned to AutoMatix. What did I want that wasnt in the default install? Hmmm, things like - Opera, gFTP, BloGTK, Vmware Server, GnuCash, MonoDevelop, MP3 player (including codecs), SAMBA (for sharing disks and printers with other Windows machines like the kids), etc.
Photo Manipulation Stuff
Having been to the Mela (did I mention the install took a while), I had a bunch of pictures to process and the available in tools were just way too slow and tedious to use. This is no different to XP, but on Windows, there was always Picasa. I grubbed around a little and discovered that Picasa runs under WINE, so I could have the best of both worlds. I installed both and lo and behold, performance is about on par with XP. Excellent.
And for more in depth RAW file manipulation - I could use GIMP which comes preinstalled - right - erm - wrong actually, yes it comes preinstalled, but by default it doesnt handle raw files. Something about Tiff file errors and unrecognized tags! More grubbing around yielded a write up of UFRAW and the GIMP plugin. A magic incantation at a command line (terminal window) of "sudo apt-get install gimp-ufraw" fixed the problem.
Conclusion
I had read reports of Ubuntu that said that finally here is a version of Linux that is ready for the mainstream. I beg to differ. It is probably fine if it comes preinstalled and you dont need any extra applications or you are prepared to read up alot and get your head around some of the techie stuff (or have someone else to do this for you), but I wouldnt recommend it to non techie friends - I would probably spend half my life getting it working for them. Most people will have specific uses for their PC, and I dont believe it is simple enough to configure for most users.
I also havent found any preinstalled AntiVirus solution, but ClamAV is meant to be good so I will give that a look.
For me, it looks like it might fit the bill, time will tell, but I will try and post updates here.
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