azcazandco

Every OS has a blood spattered lining

August 28th, 2006

So here it goes, my first delve into a post in a while and it is all about the trials and tribulations of switching operating systems, a challenge I am sure many of you would love to try but have skipped it because of the inconvenience it might cause. Every OS has a blood spattered lining, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise but what I will say is I don’t regret stepping into the world of the unknown, I love my new operating system but please believe me when I say there have been some blood, sweat and tears on the way.

I plan to write a series of articles that I hope may help you and encourage you to take a leap of faith into a new operating system. I also plan to tell you where I went wrong and try to help you avoid the pitfalls that have affected me and hopefully make life a little easier for you if you decide to go ahead with the change.

It’s not every day you decide to throw caution to the wind and unlearn everything you have learned, stick it in a blender then try and re-assemble it with a blindfold on and your hand severed at the wrist. Well, maybe it isn’t that bad but it has been a really interesting, frustrating, satisfying, frustrating (yes I said that twice) and fulfilling experience that I want to share with those of you out there that have dabbled with the concept but gone no further.

So… In case you haven’t been following my travels, I decided to try insalling Ubuntu Linux a while ago just because I had been told it was Linux for humans which sounded quite good. My initial experiences were awesome, the install was smooth, everything was far more responsive than Windows and I was able to get around without much trouble but after a while I found myself with niggles.

These niggles are 100% self inflicted, I have been tinkering and tweaking since I got Ubuntu up and running, I don’t know if you are like me but I have a tendancy to go balistic when I get a new toy and see what it can do, I did the same with Ubuntu and managed to break it… err… twice… I also managed to wipe out a partition on one of my hard drives but that is another story… it does get better, I promise

So what did I do once I had gone through the orientation process? The first thing I did was play about with the theming capabilities, one of the reasons I moved away from Windows was so that I could have a more customised (that is a dangerous word when it comes to operating systems I have found) computing experience.

By default, Ubuntu uses the GNOME Desktop Environment which is what I have actually settled on after playing about, one of the quickest ways to change the look and feel of GNOME is to head over to http://www.gnome-look.org/ and grab a selection of icons / themes and just drag them into your theme manager to install them. Ever since starting with Ubuntu I have favoured The Darker Theme which I happen to think rocks quite frankly. Once you have your theme in place you can then have a rumage through the icons and find a set that you like, I wont go into them all but there are several that I switch between at the moment.

When I first went to install Ubuntu I had head a lot about the KDE Desktop Environment which was supposed to be quite user friendly for people making the move from Windows to Linux, there is a version of Ubuntu which is pre configured to use KDE which is called Kubuntu. Ubuntu uses a really nice tool called Synaptic which allows you to browse applications and install them completely free of charge, on searching for Kubuntu it came up, I selected it for installation and it selected all the necessary bits and then installed them without any hassle. Once Kubuntu was installed I could then select it when I went to login as it allows you to choose which session you want to use.

All in all, I have tried Kubuntu, Standard Ubuntu, Xubuntu (which uses another desktop called XFCE) and I have also tried out the XGL environment which is really cool but I think at the root of a lot of my troubles.

So, software… well there is plenty of it and most of it I have been happy with but as a Windows user for many years I have had some issues with finding equivelants. To be honest, this is where I have had my major gripe as I miss Photoshop so much I could cry I am going to write about the different packages I have settled on in another article though, this is just meant to be a little precursor to what is to come.

My biggest issue with switching operating system so far is my lack of understanding of what I am doing, I am getting to grips with how things go together a little bit more but I still feel at a loss sometimes. My one recommendation to anyone making the switch would be to make sure you have a separate data partition or even better have all your data backed up full stop. I am learning the hard way, I got a new 200gb SATA drive and installed Ubuntu onto it after beating up a windows install, to cut a long story shot, I installed Ubuntu onto the whole partition along with all my data… Bad move! If you are going to install Ubuntu then make a second partition for your data (I have always done this in Windows anyway and don’t know why I didn’t do it for Ubuntu) so that if you manage to break something then you can always just re-install the operating system and all should be well.

Anyway, that about sums up my initial chat about my move to Ubuntu, I am not dissapointed in the slightest, I have found it fun, fairly straight forward and anything that has broken has been my own fault for trying to do too much. I am about to repartition my drive and re-install so once I have done that I will continue this series.

I am interested if you have any questions you want to ask or if you care to share your experiences even better, there are also a couple of other folk in 9rules going to chime in with their experiences on their own sites so hopefully we can all work together and change that blood spattered lining for a silver one… all it takes is a little patience & perserverance!