Never trust Robots
Hey andrew..’what is it robot’.. I love you…’I know you do robot’…
Ubuntu and the home PC
In the last six months, an increasing number of my home and work PC’s (Yes, I have more than 2..) Have come down with major Windows problems. From crashes and viruses to just plain slow performance.
I decided a while ago to hop off that bandwagon and learn to use Linux. I chose the Ubuntu distro, as its one of the most commonly downloaded and used. I’m not going to go into the merits of the different versions, This is the one I learned, and I’m sticking with it.
I loaded my work laptop, a IBM T60, with it and surprisingly nearly everything worked out of the box. The wireless connection at the job was a bit of a mystery, as they insisted on security and ..stuff. With that rousing success, I quickly fell about converting much of my personal collection of Frankenstein zombie PC’s.
Tonight is a major milestone in that effort, as the “main” house PC has fallen victim to malware and virus asshattery. Jack and I will be scrubbing it tonight and loading Ubuntu. The only issues we may face is the need to run Ventrillo and the Adobe CS3 suite. Neither is native to Linux, and neither is ported well.
I think we maybe overcoming those issues using VMWare player and a light windows install. VMWare for the uninitiated is a system that allows you to run one operating system inside of another. When we have it fired up, when will have a program window with a copy of Windows XP running in it, inside her Linux box. The advantage here is she still maintains security, as well as being able to reset and clean out the session if anything goes wrong.
Right this second, we are trying to copy off her old files to another PC in the house. She insists on creating all her images at 20×30 inches @200dpi. Its gigs and gigs of stuff. More updates as we go.
*EDIT: We have Ubuntu loaded after dealing with a bad DVD burner. Drive was just not reading the disk properly. swaped it out for a spare CRom I had laying around. After it was all loaded we had very few problems. Only hiccup that caused some consternation was the video. The PC has a dual head Nvidia card and two monitors. Finding a workable driver and configuration was a bit of a pain, and I have no doubt that someone inexperienced with Linux would have taken days to get that figured out. We seem to have most of the software loaded at this point and its entirely usable. I still have to try and get Ventrillo working though.
