Category: Journal

Well, it’s been a couple of weeks, and to be honest I’m really not sure….

Here is my list of things that bug me:

I still can’t find a good twitter client
Audio is patchy at best
I can’t find a good program to open and edit files over scp/sftp
Searching for files is weird
My podcatching software gives random names to the files
Applications don’t always remember where they are supposed to be (screen location)
Lots of software isn’t available to do what I want. Even Firefox extension are not cross platform. Adobe air is supposed to be cross platform, but that means Windows & Mac. Ditto Silverlight, not that I’ve found any great use for it (yet)
My scanner doesn’t work (HP Scanjet 3500)
I can’t even be bothered setting trying to set up my Brother Label Printer (P-touch QL500)
None of the free virtual machine apps seem to work properly
Help is patchy at best.
Can’t see network shares via name (e.g. \\techdr\patches)
Hibernation/sleep doesn’t work properly

Ubuntu is free, and that’s great, but to be honest, it’s probably cost me hundreds of dollars in the time it took to setup and get it even close to right. Windows is not that expensive, especially if you buy it with a system.

The other problem is that most of job is supporting windows, so I need to spend time in it. I cant really afford to waste any more time, so it is quite likely that this blog post will be one of the last things this ubuntu machine ever does. Goodbye cruel world..

I’ve tried running Linux on my laptop before, with great success, but I ended up renting that laptop to a customer to take overseas for 3 months, and buying myself a beautiful black Macbook. So the next step was my desktop, and I’ve done it. This time it was Ubuntu 7.10 which was replaced a few days later by 8.04LTS.

The transition was basically pretty smooth, I got rid of a few Windows only applications (I put Bernie in Charge of Quickbooks, so it is on her machine). Pretty much everything else I’ve found a linux equivalent of.

I bought a new machine to start with, so it means my old box is still there for the moment in case I need it, and I will probably package it up as a virtual machine in case I need anything later, as Bern is supposed to get the previous machine to replace her aging box. Building a new Windows box would have been a 2 day exercise (finding and installing & configuring all the right software) , and this took about the same length of time.

Outstanding issues:
* The digital 5.1 output that I think the sound card has doesn\’t work, had to resort to 2 front/rear cables.
* gTwitter sucks for using Twitter
* I haven’t set up my podcatching software yet
* sound is not working in skype
* I haven’t imported my address book from the old machine
* cant access the fines on the server

More updates to follow.