And much was the wailing and nashing of teeth.
Ok I’m documenting this because of the general interest in Linux on these here boards.
This my 2nd attempt at runing Linux on my box. My first was a duel boot Suse 9.0/Windows XP on the same hard drive partioned, which worked nicely until Windows Xp refused to boot up. This was in the recommended install where you put Win Xp on first and your linux distro second. So it kinda makes you think there’s abit of foul play on Microsofts part.
Now the important factor in these experiments that you need to remember is that the Newport household is a one PC house, i.e. I share my pc with my wife who expects everything to run smoothly and treats me like the lowest common denominator IT support, forgeting I am her beloved, if it doesn’t.
Therefore at the end of experiment one I reinstalled Win Xp in one partition to avoid spousal hassles.
Experiment two was equally optimistic. This time put a second hard drive as a slave, with Ubuntu 6.06 running on it. Works for about a month then SMART (the system which monitors the Health of your hard drives on boot) reported that hard drive 1 (Windows XP) is about to fail. Which it did yesterday.
Strange thing is that I’m able to back up all the data from windows via my Ubuntu install, which can still read a susposably ‘dead’ hard disk.
So today I return our beloved machine to a single drive Windows XP machine to restore harmony in the land of Newts.
Why Win Xp? Well Ubuntu is a cracking desktop, in fact I prefer it vastly over WinXp. Its got everything I want out of the box, working out of the box and if it doesn’t I simply pull on the vast knowledge base of the ubuntu/linux community. I love Amarok the mp3 player, and as I’ve found out this morning backing up data using K3b a free opensource program is painless and quick compared to the best WinXp program Nero. I’m even quite found of OpenOffice which is meant to be the weak link in the Linux desktop compared to windows. Nope the reason why I’m going back to Win Xp, as well as keeping the missus happy, is
GAMES
I found even using Ubuntu exclusively for my internet/media and office needs, that I missed certain games such as Call of Duty2 (which I play at least 4 hours a week online) that currently only work on Windows. Unfortunatly this isn’t going to get much beter since most modern games use Direct X, and despite things like wine (windows emulator) and Cegedra (wine based subscribtion service that gets games to work on Linux for about £3 a month) performance is never going to be as good as under windows. The only way I can see this deadlock being broken is if one of the big games software developers put out a rival api, but I can’t see this happening soon since by their very nature games developers are busy developing….well er games.
But this is not the end of my Linux experiments. I’m using in at work, were I have a debian webserver up and going and were just about to set up an ubuntu production webserver and I’ve got clearance from my manager, the head of IT, to put in for a laptop on which I’ll install Ubuntu.