My history with Linux
Non-tech people will probably find this post VERY BORING! I just felt like documenting this for my own journaling purposes. You have been warned!
I've had an interest in Linux for several years now. It all started several years ago at my last W-2 job. I can't remember for sure why I thought Linux would be perfect for some project I was working on, but apparently I did. I think it was because I had to do a lot of programmatic text file manipulation. Anyway, I pulled an old, first generation Pentium machine off the retirement pile on the back dock and loaded up RedHat on it.
I got it installed without incident and spent the afternoon getting familiar with it. Within a couple of days, I had solved whatever problem I needed Linux for. About the same time, one of the guys I worked with hooked me up with some MP3's. (This was back before most people had ever even heard of the RIAA. MP3's were still very new.) I had been trying to play them on my Windows machine, but was a little irritated because any disk intensive operations, like compiling programs, would make the music stutter horribly. I decided to put the mostly unused Linux box to work as my MP3 player. I guess you could call it a compaq-Pod. It worked quite well and I even added a few of my own MP3's to the collection. The nice thing was that even when I had to use the machine to parse those large text files, the music never skipped a beat.
A few weeks later, I was over at my co-workers desk and I realized he was listening to a song I had added to my collection within the last day or two. He said that when he found all the songs on my Linux box, he just changed his MP3 player to read it from that machine over the network. I realized that I had been listening to music, he'd been listening to music, and I'd been processing some fairly large text files on a machine that was ancient in computer terms and it had literally never missed a beat for either one of us! Windows (back then) had no hope of being able to multi-task that well. I was hooked!
At least I thought I was. Around a year and a half later, I left that job and moved out into the world of contracting. I've occasionally dual-booted into various Linux distributions, but it's almost impossible to get rid of Windows completely when you earn your living writing programs for it. Linux eventually faded into the background although I occasionally surfed various websites just to see how it was evolving.
Again, I don't remember why, but something or someone got me interested into seeing how the Linux world was doing. I checked out Ubuntu and was impressed with what I'd seen. I was just finalizing plans to build my new computer and by the time the parts had arrived, I'd already decided I'd leave some space on the hard drive to eventually install Ubuntu's latest version.
I think it was February when I finally started playing around with it. In the time between February and April, I eventually got Ubuntu installed on my machine. I had a little difficulties with the beta releases of Ubuntu 7.04 because of my particular hardware but I read on their forums that the problem has been noted and would get fixed. Sure enough, it did. Also during that time, I rescued an old PC from work, wiped the drive, and installed Unbuntu on it for the church. It's still there today, but is about to be replaced with a brand new Windows laptop. (Long story as to why and not really the point of my post.)
Overall, I really like using Ubuntu. The interface is so much more flexible and configurable. You can make it look as cool or as mundane as you want. My system feels much faster running it and boots WAY, WAY faster. From power up to logged in and ready to go in well under a minute. Although Windows will give me the login screen about as quickly, it takes a LONG time to finish loading all the tons of crap that runs under that hood. The system is just not very responsive for at least couple of more minutes.
Another advantage is that you can find software to do just about anything you want to do for free. I have to caveat that statement, though. Many times the programs aren't as well polished as their Windows counterparts. Also, support for them can disappear overnight if the only author/programmer on a particular project decides he's bored with it and wants to move on. I don't think that happens very often on the main programs that a lot of people use, but it can happen. The bottom line though, is that I've actually been having quite a bit of fun "fiddling around" with all of this and getting my Ubuntu installation ready to become my primary operating system.
I am still struggling with a few of major roadblocks, however. First of all, I can't figure out why I can't connect to the VPN at O'Charley's so I can work from home. It's supposed to work, but there must be some hidden setting that I need to tweak. Also, my digital voice recorder is not supported in Linux at all under any configuration. (That's not too big a deal as I mainly had it for church board meetings and I'm not on the board anymore.) I've also heard that it's very difficult to sync Windows Mobile devices to a Linux OS and, if Verizon ever gets off it's ass, I'll be upgrading to a Windows Mobile PDA Phone. (That's a subject for another post.) Finally, Quicken 2007 will not run inside the Windows emulation layer of Linux and I've got 15 years worth of data in my Quicken files.
(Almost done here. Just one more topic to get through. If you read this far, why would you stop now?)
Now, dual-booting is an option, but it just sucks so much when you're in Linux and you need to do one little thing, like enter a couple of checks into Quicken. I'd prefer to run Windows inside a virtual machine hosted by Linux. I've had some success with VMWare Server, but it isn't ideal. For example, I've yet to get a functional way to get files off of the virtual hard drive and out into the Linux environment. Similarly, I can pass just about any USB device into the virtual machine but not my USB thumb drive which I could use to get around the previous problem. I have a feeling they deliberately make this difficult so you'll choose to buy the next higher version of the software instead of the free stuff. I'm not philosophically opposed to it, but they want $189 for it and I just don't want to spend that unless I have no other choice.
The last couple of days, I've been trying to get VirtualBox to run. While not quite as stable as VMWare Server, it's supposed to make up for some of the shortcomings. Unfortunately, I'm having problems getting it to boot up with my current installation. If I could get some type of virtualization going, I could run Linux full time and only boot up a virtual Windows environment on the occasions that I need it.
Well, I'm running out of steam. That's all for now.
(Hmm...I need a tech-related user icon.)
I've had an interest in Linux for several years now. It all started several years ago at my last W-2 job. I can't remember for sure why I thought Linux would be perfect for some project I was working on, but apparently I did. I think it was because I had to do a lot of programmatic text file manipulation. Anyway, I pulled an old, first generation Pentium machine off the retirement pile on the back dock and loaded up RedHat on it.
I got it installed without incident and spent the afternoon getting familiar with it. Within a couple of days, I had solved whatever problem I needed Linux for. About the same time, one of the guys I worked with hooked me up with some MP3's. (This was back before most people had ever even heard of the RIAA. MP3's were still very new.) I had been trying to play them on my Windows machine, but was a little irritated because any disk intensive operations, like compiling programs, would make the music stutter horribly. I decided to put the mostly unused Linux box to work as my MP3 player. I guess you could call it a compaq-Pod. It worked quite well and I even added a few of my own MP3's to the collection. The nice thing was that even when I had to use the machine to parse those large text files, the music never skipped a beat.
A few weeks later, I was over at my co-workers desk and I realized he was listening to a song I had added to my collection within the last day or two. He said that when he found all the songs on my Linux box, he just changed his MP3 player to read it from that machine over the network. I realized that I had been listening to music, he'd been listening to music, and I'd been processing some fairly large text files on a machine that was ancient in computer terms and it had literally never missed a beat for either one of us! Windows (back then) had no hope of being able to multi-task that well. I was hooked!
At least I thought I was. Around a year and a half later, I left that job and moved out into the world of contracting. I've occasionally dual-booted into various Linux distributions, but it's almost impossible to get rid of Windows completely when you earn your living writing programs for it. Linux eventually faded into the background although I occasionally surfed various websites just to see how it was evolving.
Again, I don't remember why, but something or someone got me interested into seeing how the Linux world was doing. I checked out Ubuntu and was impressed with what I'd seen. I was just finalizing plans to build my new computer and by the time the parts had arrived, I'd already decided I'd leave some space on the hard drive to eventually install Ubuntu's latest version.
I think it was February when I finally started playing around with it. In the time between February and April, I eventually got Ubuntu installed on my machine. I had a little difficulties with the beta releases of Ubuntu 7.04 because of my particular hardware but I read on their forums that the problem has been noted and would get fixed. Sure enough, it did. Also during that time, I rescued an old PC from work, wiped the drive, and installed Unbuntu on it for the church. It's still there today, but is about to be replaced with a brand new Windows laptop. (Long story as to why and not really the point of my post.)
Overall, I really like using Ubuntu. The interface is so much more flexible and configurable. You can make it look as cool or as mundane as you want. My system feels much faster running it and boots WAY, WAY faster. From power up to logged in and ready to go in well under a minute. Although Windows will give me the login screen about as quickly, it takes a LONG time to finish loading all the tons of crap that runs under that hood. The system is just not very responsive for at least couple of more minutes.
Another advantage is that you can find software to do just about anything you want to do for free. I have to caveat that statement, though. Many times the programs aren't as well polished as their Windows counterparts. Also, support for them can disappear overnight if the only author/programmer on a particular project decides he's bored with it and wants to move on. I don't think that happens very often on the main programs that a lot of people use, but it can happen. The bottom line though, is that I've actually been having quite a bit of fun "fiddling around" with all of this and getting my Ubuntu installation ready to become my primary operating system.
I am still struggling with a few of major roadblocks, however. First of all, I can't figure out why I can't connect to the VPN at O'Charley's so I can work from home. It's supposed to work, but there must be some hidden setting that I need to tweak. Also, my digital voice recorder is not supported in Linux at all under any configuration. (That's not too big a deal as I mainly had it for church board meetings and I'm not on the board anymore.) I've also heard that it's very difficult to sync Windows Mobile devices to a Linux OS and, if Verizon ever gets off it's ass, I'll be upgrading to a Windows Mobile PDA Phone. (That's a subject for another post.) Finally, Quicken 2007 will not run inside the Windows emulation layer of Linux and I've got 15 years worth of data in my Quicken files.
(Almost done here. Just one more topic to get through. If you read this far, why would you stop now?)
Now, dual-booting is an option, but it just sucks so much when you're in Linux and you need to do one little thing, like enter a couple of checks into Quicken. I'd prefer to run Windows inside a virtual machine hosted by Linux. I've had some success with VMWare Server, but it isn't ideal. For example, I've yet to get a functional way to get files off of the virtual hard drive and out into the Linux environment. Similarly, I can pass just about any USB device into the virtual machine but not my USB thumb drive which I could use to get around the previous problem. I have a feeling they deliberately make this difficult so you'll choose to buy the next higher version of the software instead of the free stuff. I'm not philosophically opposed to it, but they want $189 for it and I just don't want to spend that unless I have no other choice.
The last couple of days, I've been trying to get VirtualBox to run. While not quite as stable as VMWare Server, it's supposed to make up for some of the shortcomings. Unfortunately, I'm having problems getting it to boot up with my current installation. If I could get some type of virtualization going, I could run Linux full time and only boot up a virtual Windows environment on the occasions that I need it.
Well, I'm running out of steam. That's all for now.
(Hmm...I need a tech-related user icon.)