Moved to Linux....

Windows crashed on me one too many times...

I'm now running Mandrake Linux 10. I'd been thinking of making the switch away from the dark side for a while, but you know... laziness and the fear/dislike of being a newbie all over again (coupled with a bit of general procrastination) kept me on XP. Five days ago though, when I was installing a new hard drive in my system (250gb Maxtor drive, decent specs - 7200 rpm with 8mb cache, mmmm yummm), a documented bug in Windows regarding the NTFS file system caused me to lose my entire XP installation. Data wasn't lost, just the OS itself, rendering my XP installation useless. I figured, I could either reload Windows (AGAIN - that's twice it has crashed irrepairably in 2004 so far), or... make the move.

The Mandrake install was nearly flawless. I had a little trouble with my wireless USB lan card, a Linksys WUSB11 "Instant Wireless" card, version 2.6, but my troubles were partly due to overlooking the fact that Mandrake actually shipped with support for the card (using the Atmel drivers) - I just hadn't configured the connection to my access point completely. Once I did, it worked like a charm.

I was able to get all of my contacts and email from Outlook by importing it all into Mozilla mail, then importing that into evolution (my new chosen calendar/email/contact program in Linux). (Evolution doesn't support Outlook files directly, but it supports Mozilla files - thus, the use of Mozilla in the middle there. Mozilla uses standard mbox formats for its mail).

My big concern was Macromedia Dreamweaver - though I got MX running under the trial version of Crossover Office in Linux. I'm going to also try VMWare and see which I like better. I have a couple Windows games I'd like to be able to play, so VMWare might be teh way to go. I'm trying out Bluefish and Quanta as alternatives to my previous TextPad/Dreamweaver combo for web editing. We'll see how that goes!

All is going well so far. I hope to never look back! :)