Moving On From Windows

November 9th, 2008 | by jeff |

I can’t stand the thought of using Vista. I am an XP user; by which I mean to say I get by using cygwin and some of the Windows apps. But I’ve used Vista enough for me to know that I must draw the proverbial line in the sand there.

XP will be the last Windows OS I will ever use.

That’s a big statement for me. I’ve been running GNU/Linux servers and some desktop OS for years, but I’ve never gone completely Windows-free. But it is definitely time. Aside: I know many readers use Macs. And I will concede there is a strong argument to be made to do that. But look, I’ll be honest- I just don’t have that kind of money to spend on a computer right now.

So it’s time to say hello to the GNU/Linux desktop.

Now, after thinking about this a little bit, I realized my goal is not to mimic Windows, and I’m not really interested in a rich UI look and feel. I don’t need to be “wowed” by the graphics; I want a new computing experience. In light of that, I decided to skip Ubuntu. I also didn’t want a million packages I knew nothing about. I wanted more control over my computing, and in light of that I decided to skip Fedora and Suse. In the end I installed Blag, which claims to use 100% free software, with the exception I suppose of the Linux kernel.

Anyway, it seems like a good place to start. I immediately tarnished this image by installing my jdk. I installed emacs, which for some reason worked via yum install emacs but not via the package manager. I’ve also installed easyeclipse expert java version.

I’ve had trouble getting the wireless working on my laptop, and also don’t seem to have any sound at the moment. I’ll let you know how it goes…

UPDATE
BLAG didn’t last long. I wanted to run eclipse, but the distribution I wanted to use required GTK+ 2.2.1. The only GTK+ reference I could find, the GTK+ website, had GTK 1.2 as the latest release. I fished around on a few different yum repositories without any luck. Also, the sound didn’t work in BLAG.

I’ve since installed Suse, and now have bluetooth, wireless, and sound. I’m using the KDE desktop instead of Gnome.

UPDATE
I just realized I was reading the latest gtk+ release as 2.1.4 instead of what it really is, 2.14. Wow, that really threw me off!

  1. 2 Responses to “Moving On From Windows”

  2. By Ken Rawlings on Nov 10, 2008 | Reply

    I’m in the same boat. I’m running XP x64 for now at home and trying to find a Linux to transition to. Give the newest Xubuntu a shot sometime. I’m liking it quite a bit and the only hardware issue I’ve run into so far on all the machines I’ve installed it on is an intermittent issue with wireless coming back online on my eee.

  3. By Jeff on Nov 11, 2008 | Reply

    I tried to install Kubuntu, but found clicking the Install option on the startup screen didn’t work. I’m not sure why it is, but I had trouble with my CDROM with a few different distributions. I tried burning multiple iso CDs but had the same, consistent problems. I suspect not all distributions picked up my CDROM driver correctly.

    At this point I have installed OpenSuse, with the KDE desktop.

    Thanks for your comment, I’ll keep an eye on your blog for future Linux posts, good luck with your transition!

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