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Archive for February 6th, 2010

Wow, that worked out nicely! In about 20 minutes I got Ubuntu fully installed with video and network support. It also has OpenOffice, IM and Email clients, a BitTorrent client, and system utilities which look very similar to the ones you get with Windows, and full support for USB. Ok, so far I’m impressed with the Karmic Koala. Sure, I haven’t done much with it yet, the install is half the battle, right?

I started the install at 1:52pm and I was looking at my desktop at 2:19pm. This also includes the time it took to completely format the 640GB drive since it had Windows 7 64bit on it. I figure that took at least a few minutes so the actual install took about 20 minutes. As an aside, it did recognize that I had Windows 7 still on the drive and gave me the option to dual boot. I doubt Windows 7 would have been so kind.

I even got it to play AVI, WMV and MP3 files right off the bat. It’s a simple download to get the codecs. I was actually a little surprised by that.

I forgot that I could use Virtualbox to install a virtual copy of Windows or use WINE to try and run some apps for those times when I would need them. Looks like Virtualbox is the more likely choice since WINE doesn’t support Paint Shop Pro, or Live Writer. I doubt OneNote would work either, but a virtual machine isn’t the end of the world. I’m not quite ready to make the switch, but if this test bed works out Windows may be off this machine sooner rather than later.

Since I now have a spare machine lying around I contemplated what to do with it. It’s an old Dell Dimension P4 with 4GB of ram and the 640GB drive that used to be in my new AMD Dell, before I pulled it out and replaced it with something bigger. I thought about using the machine as a massive paperweight – stylish and effective, but not very practical. The idea of a flowpot came to mind, but I figured it would start leaking. I could take it out back and shoot it – fun and exciting, but not very long lasting.

So I decided to go completely radical and install Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on to it! I tried the 7.x series a few years back and found it rather convoluted when trying to install additional components. The OS itself worked great but adding additional components didn’t work so well. It seems the 9.x series has changed a lot of that so I think it’s time to jump in again.

Windows 7 is far from impressive and with new products like the iPad, Chrome OS, Mac OSX, Ubuntu and other yet unannounced products coming out later this year it seems the Windows revolution is coming to an end. And I have to say I’m not sad to see it go. I’m not going to be able to just quit using Windows, there’s still quite a few apps I still use like Paint Shop Pro, Live Writer, OneNote, Quicken, that just don’t have a Unix equivalent. However, I think Unix flavors will gain speed this upcoming year and I’m curious to have a look for myself. With the speed and memory of this new machine I could easily run Virtualbox with Windows 7 running inside. That probably seems redundant and maybe for the next year or so it will be, but I feel the winds of change coming on. Personally, I really hope Windows 7 is the last version of Windows I use. I find Win7 to be bloated, annoying, insanely expensive and short on real useful features. Plus, if everyone is moving to "cloud computing" what does it matter what OS I’m using? If I just need a browser why should I spend $150-400 on Windows?

I have my boot disc and a machine ready to go.This should be interesting!