Saturday, July 03, 2004

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! :)

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