Well, it’s been a while since my last post.
After a lot of AppleScript adventuring I finally got my “Start Button for OSX” project to a stage at which I felt I could abandon it gracefully. You can find the results here.
Back in March I decided not to build my own PC to run Vista and instead I saved about $400 (for equivalent spec.) by buying a new Acer Aspire T180 desktop that included Vista Home Premium Edition and nVidia GeForce 6100 graphics. I spent the money I saved on a 22″ LG L226WT LCD monitor, good for my eyes.
I soon got bored taking screenshots of Vista to refer to at work, and I decided to try Linux again for the first time since Red Hat 7.3, which I figure must be six or seven years ago. I love my two Macs and OSX has been a real treat, so at least all that time I never went into UNIX-withdrawal.
After checking out a few “distros” I decided to try Ubuntu Feisty, mainly because it’s wholesomely popular these days and they have happy colours on their web site. I installed the amd_64 version using their “Live CD”. Since then I’ve been having a lot of fun, but also quite a few problems:
- Third-party video driver installation was hardly intuitive and the fact that I had to do it myself was not a good start.
- The Ubuntu forums are great and by now I’m almost up to a free cup of coffee or something.
- Once I had my nVidia card working properly a co-worker told me about Beryl and I love it. Neither OSX or Windows Vista can do all those things so well yet.
- Getting Adobe Flash to work was a pain, mostly just doing the research.
- I installed ntfs-config so I can read/write freely to my Vista NTFS partitions. This was easy and very satisfying. But why doesn’t this also work “out of the box”?
- The standard Linux fonts are awful, making web sites like The New York Times look particularly revolting in Firefox. Fortunately Red Hat has made their “Liberation” True Type fonts available for free, and after a little tweaking my Linux desktop and Firefox look almost as pretty and easy to read as OSX and Safari, or Vista and IE7.
- Getting Samba to work both ways with OSX was not straightforward, and I still can’t browse and mount “Windows file shares” by computer name from Linux. I have to use IP addresses instead.
- I can’t run my Linksys WUSB54G V1 wireless adapter because there is no 64-bit driver to use with ndiswrapper. I tried using the native Prism 54 drivers and firmware and after lots research and fiddling I actually got the card to work but only for a short time. Oh, the tears of running a 64-bit operating system!
- I then embarked on the adventure of trying to get Prism 54 to work better, but first I had to learn how to use git and the mysteries of Debian kernel packaging. Eventually I did get a Linux 2.6.22 kernel compiled and running, but it took a while. For example, I had to try no less than three different tools to get an initrd image that would boot. Only Yaird worked.
- I found there are still many irritating bugs in Gnome, such as several system administration applets not working. Services-admin, network-admin, users-admin, and setting the clock all have known bugs and are simply unusable. Not being able to browse and mount “Windows” shares by name is related. What’s the point of having the applets in Gnome at all if they don’t work reliably? These are known bugs that have been around for a while, which is disappointing, and I can’t see Linux being successful as a mainstream alternative to Windows or OSX while such problems persist.
- While experimenting to work around the “services-admin” problem I somehow managed to trash Gnome altogether and I was not able to resuscitate it by uninstalling/reinstalling packages using Aptitude.
So now I have reinstalled Ubuntu Feisty Desktop x86_64 and I’m going back through all the above, as well as re-installing Apache2 and MySQL so that machine can run my home web server and host my by-now-almost-forgotten “Content Management Project”.
That’s it for now. Maybe more details later.