So I spent the holiday weekend getting my new PC squared away with a copy of Ubuntu Linux. For my first serious foray into non MS operating systems I have to say I am very pleased.
Ubuntu comes with a healthy complement of apps including Firefox and Open Office as well as a chat client that works with Yahoo AIM and others. I was also able to connect to the shared folders on the Windows PCs in the house and connect to my scanner and the shared printers. In addition, Ubuntu sports a wonderful package manager that lets me install or uninstall aplpications from Linux repositories. Thanks to this I have added some great widgets like a CD/DVD burning program, Tomboy (which should prove to be wildly useful) and some excellent HTML and PHP development tools.
While I have a lot to learn about Linux, the wonder that is open source software combined with Google has been a lot of fun. I found detailed instructions for installing Java, upgrading Firefox and getting the proper codecs to play DVDs on my system.
All in all a weekend of geekery well spent. I’m looking forward to many years with this machine carrying the load. I still have a desktop and laptop running XP since there are too many MS specific tasks to get rid of them, but I am slowly whittling those needs away. Next on the list is figuring out why the codecs for Windows Media aren’t working on the Linux box.
