The Reason
After years of on-off love affairs with Linux, I have finally decided to taken the plunge. A worm infection, (err... of the computer variety of course) that took out most of my EXEs gave me the final push into the arms of the penguin.
After scavenging various computing devices for hard disk space, I finally managed to convince my beautiful wife to lend me her laptop's hard disk for the inevitable backups.
The backup
The files I require:
Eclipse..yes
Jboss..yes
Ant...right away please
AVG Anti Virus....ermm..no thank you. Won't be needing you for a bit. Wasn't that good in the first place.
MS Office....Nah.
Outlook...Nadaa
The Plunge
So there I was, 3am in the morning, with backups on the laptop, various removable disks and some CDs.
A final cigarette to dull the pain should anything go wrong.
The CD goes in; the Ubuntu splash screen comes on and “Select and Install Ubuntu” begins to proceed. 10 minutes later I'm booting into my new Ubuntu screen and
The Surface
EVERYTHING WORKS!
Wireless .. OK
Resolution ...1440x900 OK
Compiz 3D effects .. OK (very OK, on an Intel GMA)
MP3 playing (after a painless update for the codecs)...OK
MPEG playback OK
Hot keys, CD play buttons on laptop OK
SD Card Reader Not detecting my MMC card.
(However a quick search reveals the following site for my Ricoh card reader. To know which card reader is installed on your PC, use 'lspci' and look for stuff that mentions card readers.
The site in question is http://intr.overt.org/blog/?p=59)
Post Installation
Proceeded to install all the applications that I require using the Synaptics Package Manager
Thunderbird,
Sun JDK 1.6 (The GCJ version is really bad)
Eclipse
Oracle 11g
Fixed the fonts on Firefox by downloading the MS True Type fonts (open synaptics & search for “msttcorefonts”)
and there you have it. A complete replica of my previous Windows XP setup. And by the looks of things, I'm never gonna look back. My colleagues at work are already amazed at the 3D effects, and the fact that they can actually open a DOCX file in my OpenOffice Word that they just couldn't on Office XP!
Machine Specs
Intel Core 2 Duo 1.55GHz
2GB RAM
60 GB SATA Hard Disk
Intel GMA
