After years of proclaimed nerdery, I’ve finally decided to take the Linux plunge. That’s not to say that I’ve never used Linux before, but as nerdy as I am, it’s taken me a while to really get excited about switching from Windows to Linux on any of my day-to-day use machines. I’ve tried a few flavors of Linux in the past, but I always ended up having so much difficulty getting things working properly that I usually just gave up before I got to any point of satisfactory stability. I had a Macbook a few years back and tried running Yellow Dog, but I could never even get that one installed. That turned me off for a while, but I eventually got curious again and Handy Randy helped me get Fedora Core running on a old Compaq Proliant server that I keep in the basement and use strictly for file storage. That machine is stable and serves it’s purpose, but it’s not really a day-to-day use sorta machine. I do have one other Linux box (an old Pentium II 200Mghz Compaq) on which I have installed a firewall build of Linux called Smoothwall which serves to protect my home network. That bad boy rocks and I highly suggest a Smoothwall for any home network with a high speed internet connection. But that machine isn’t a daily use machine either. It does get used daily, but only in the fact that its always running. I hardly ever actually have to physically manage that machine.

Enter Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)…

A few months ago Zach was tinkering with Ubuntu Linux on his Toshiba laptop. He kept telling me how nifty it was and how much he thought I’d like it, but I just never got around to installing it. Eventually he ended up having some blue tooth issues (I think) that he couldn’t resolve. Long story short, he ended up uninstalling it. I kinda took that as a sign, and just forgot about it. Then, about a week and a half ago, Zach aimed me a link to the Beryl Project page. After a quick review of that site, my curiosity was immediately peaked at the prospect of a fully accelerated desktop. Brian, with whom I have worked for several years has recently acquired a brand spanking new Macbook and is constantly spouting off about the super-nifty goodness of the OSX accelerated environment. And to be honest, some of the tricks he likes to show off are quite nifty indeed. So I decided it was finally time. If for no other reason that to show Brian that you don’t have to have a Mac to be cool.

I downloaded the Ubuntu iso and immediately tried installing it on my aging Dell Inspiron 8200. The Install was a breeze and within 25 minutes I was officially an Ubuntu user. For the most part, my hardware was all recognized and installed with almost no effort on my part. Way to go Linux community. I quickly discovered though, that the default video drivers did not support the 3d accelerator on my Nvidia GeForce 440 Go card. Now to be fair, even Nvidia’s support for this card is far less than stellar. I’ve actually had to resort to using a somewhat “modified” version of the Nvidia drivers that I obtained from guru3d.com in order to get this card working properly in a Windows environment, so I wasn’t really surprised. After a bit of digging though, I stumbled across a cool tool called Automatix. This is a pretty cool tool used within Linux to keep track of and install drivers and software from several Linux repositories. After installing Automatix I was presented with an update to the Nvidia drivers that I decided to try out. Automatix made the download and install a two-click process and when it was finished, my 3d accelerator was working like a champ. Wow… thanks again Linux community.

The next challenge was to try out Beryl to see if my old 440 go card would actually support an accelerated desktop. I went through the installation instructions on the Beryl page and after a small bit of tinkering, had it installed. Time to hold my breath and reboot to see if the install worked. I rebooted my machine and… nothing. Crap! I could get into the “safe mode” terminal version, but I couldn’t get into X which is the gui shell that goes on top of Linux. After messing around with it for a good day and a half, I finally gave up and decided to start over from scratch. About this time I’m wondering if all the effort is actually worth it, but I decide to stick it out and try again. So I reinstalled Ubuntu and the few drivers and pieces of software I felt were essential. Then it’s back to try Beryl again. As I started through the instructions page again, I noticed a small detail that had slipped past me the first time. There are two different sets of installation instructions depending on which set of Nvidia drivers you happen to be using. Of course, I had used the wrong instructions last time… DUH! So I tried the install again and rebooted. Moment of truth time… HA! X came up, I’m half-way there. When I try running Beryl… drum roll… it works! I am now running a 3d accelerated desktop on Linux and although it’s a tad sluggish on my aging video card, it works like a friggen champ.

So am I completely sold on Ubuntu over Windows? No. There are several things I’ve come to like about Windows. I have a set up and a collection of software that just works well. Plus I can play all my games on my Windows machine. There are ways to play games on Ubuntu and in most cases, there are similar replacement tools to those you’re used to in Windows. However, they don’t always work quite as well. Plus the fact that you have to be willing to tinker in order to get some things to work at all in Linux. I have had a few troubles and it’s taken quite a bit of investigation in order to figure out how to correct them. For example… Firefox kept crashing on me whenever I would visit a Flash enabled web page. I had the latest version of flash player installed, but every time I hit a page with flash… BOOM!!! Firefox would just shut down. I finally discovered that this was being caused by the fact that the default color depth was being set to 16 instead of 24. Once I modified the video configuration file everything worked fine, but it’s that sort of issue that you’d never have to deal with in Windows. I’m also still having some quirky wireless issues with my Intel 2200bg card. Anytime WEP is enabled on a DHCP access point, my card seems to be very picky about which sites I can actually surf to. I can ping pretty much any site, but as far as I can discover, there are some weird DHCP issues that seem to be causing Firefox to be “selective” about where it will allow me to go. I haven’t really found a solution to that one yet. I did finally get things working on my home wireless and then the power went out and my access point restarted. Now I’m back to the same set of issues and I’m only able to surf here and there. Luckily ModStomp is one of the sites that I CAN get to. I also have yet to find an acceptable replacement to Audiograbber for ripping audio cd’s to mp3. I found a tool called GRIP, but it’s a bit sluggish in comparison.

On the flip-side though, Beryl is wicked-cool. Admittedly, it’s more just eye candy than actually useful, but even so. There’s just something cool about being able to view your workspaces as a rotating cube. And the ability to make your windows burn in a wall of flame any time you decide to close them is just fun. Cool as it is though, Ubuntu is not for everyone. Be prepared to tinker and tweak in order to make it work how you’d like. You need to be fairly computer savvy and mostly fearless to be an effective Linux user. If you’re worried about screwing something up, Linux is not for you. You need to be prepared to jump into the deep end with both feet if you want to make Linux work for you. If you are willing though, the Linux community offers a vast resource for assistance and applications to accomplish just about anything you’d like to do. For now I think I’ll continue to leave me laptop a dual boot machine so I have the option of either Ubuntu or Windows, but I now see a future with Linux that I wasn’t so sure about a few weeks ago. And of the flavors I’ve sampled over the years, Ubuntu is definitely the best I’ve played with so far. I guess only time will tell if I’m a Linux user deep down inside. I’ll let you know how it goes as I get into it more. And check out the links page for a growing list of useful Linux tools and applications I’ve found.