“I’m telling you about my feet! My investigating feet.”
Feet in the sense that i have just installed ubuntu on my laptop which comes pre configured with gnome which has a footprint as it’s logo – yes very loose link but i felt the need to reference red dwarf and it’s my blog so i will do as i please :p
Although my feet (sorry – laptop) is not my primary machine, it is my most used machine for general surfing of the interwebs and word processing, mainly due to the ease of working anywhere around the house etc. Its the kind of pickup and go element that makes it so handy.
In terms of data it is also completely disposable as everything on it is either backed to USB or synced remotely so is the perfect candidate for “playing”
So with all this ease of use and system stability that i have lovingly created (in Vista – shock! horror!) i have decided to throw it all out of the window to have a play with Linux…
Now i have not played with linux properly for a long time, the last time I can recall was way back in the day when me and my friend Jon were had a copy of SUSE Linux spent hours getting it installed and configured only to hit the brick wall of;
“Hey we have linux installed!
The level of geek is high within us.
What now? I dunno, Mahjongg?
Nah, lets put windows back on and play Quakeworld!!”
And so was the problem with linux – we wanted it but we did not know what to do with it once we had it. Jon went on to get apache running and get php up and working (remember phpinside Jon? :p ) but for me it was always a case of “so what now?”
Personally i think the problem there was that i was still discovering computing and the answer “you can do anything you want!” was far too obvious to make sense – “But how? where? what?”
So fast forward 10 years give or take (that makes me feel old!) and i now have a greater understanding of what i want to do.
So here i am. Writing this post on my laptop, in Firefox, running on ubuntu. How long did it take me to set this up? Not long, about 40 mins from shutting down Vista!
So far the only issue i have had was trying to remember the wireless key! Now starts the task of tweaking and playing…
See, I have these feet…
2 comments
Haha, they were the days! Yeah I remember phpinside, I think zend.com are still waiting for me to write a tutorial for their site! 😉 I’m running Linux one nearly all my machines (apart from my wife’s laptop that is). There’s some cracking software that I’d consider “must have’s”.
Songbird – Music player like Amazon.
Aptana – For all your coding needs
Open Office – You can guess..
And don’t forget the games like Mahjongg 😉
I’m having some fun with linux and even got my house mate to try it out a few times. I think part of the help in the transition is the fact that firefox is available and looks the same so no system shock! I have been using amarock for music and screem for coding though to be honest over the Christmas period i have not done much coding. I have got my last.fm account sorted now and as such have put a recent played list in the footer of my site.
Code edited and uploaded on linux 🙂