Earlier this month I talked some about all the great things that are working in Linux now.
I started using Linux in early 2002 when Michael installed Redhat 7.2 on my computer. I was dual booting with Windows 2000 at the time, but with Michael’s help (and the help of a few friends online) I was weened off of Windows in just a couple months. But Linux wasn’t ready for primetime in 2002, I still needed Windows for some things and would reluctantly boot into it from time to time.
This has been the case for the past 5 years. Somewhere along the way I “upgraded” to Windows XP, which I disliked even more than Windows 2000. I stopped customizing my Windows install at that point, not even a desktop background. When I went into windows it was for a single task to be completed, or to test out some hardware that wasn’t working in Linux and I wanted to confirm it was a Linux problem and not a hardware problem.
I got up early Friday morning and before work managed to solve the final problem that had me booting into Windows semi-regularly: printing. I knew printing would work (it worked before some random upgrade), but CUPS is still such a beast and Michael knows a lot more about our network printing setup than I do. Luckily the solution ended up being an easy configuration one that I fixed pretty quickly. What freedom now! I don’t need to reboot for printing!
So what do I need to boot into Windows for? Not my mp3 player, not burning CDs, not printing. Seeing how websites I design look in IE? Ah, but Michael said he’d solve that one for me by tossing Crossover Office (yep, we bought it, worth every penny!) on my machine and getting it running with IE in the same setup he has on his machine.
That pretty much just leaves “so we have a Windows machine somewhere in the house” which still includes cross testing hardware and such. I guess it’s not a horrible purpose, since my machine is the only one stable, fast and available as a partial Windows machine. So no, I won’t be saying goodbye yet, but I won’t be booting into it nearly as often. And Vista? It will probably never see the light of day at my house, I am confident that by the time XP is EOLed Linux will be at a point where I will have no reason to keep Windows around at all.
And I could stop there, but I read a blog entry last night that really made me smile. A few months back Don Crowder over at Don-Guitar.com dropped me a kind note about my website. We’ve loosely kept in touch since then, Don is a very interesting fellow and so is his wife Lisa. They run the ezine Don’s Batch (RSS feed here). It’s a great little (actually, quite big!) old-style ezine with links Don and Lisa find in their daily travels on the net, as well has contributions from their pretty large reader base. I skim through it regularly and find interesting things, I especially enjoy the Linux section they have now which often has a lot of links to resources for people new to Linux, and I’m always interested in seeing those. Anyway, the entry that made me happy? The right to choose an Operating System – it gives a quick outline with Don and Lisa’s adventures in Linux over the past couple years. It’s always interesting for me to read such journeys, especially since Don and Lisa strike me as such normal people who were just out to find a reliable, inexpensive alternative to Windows – and found it! To be fair, Don has spent quite a bit of time with it and turned into a bit of a geek, so this isn’t an “Aunt Erma” story, but it’s still a nice story that highlights some of the great things about Linux vs Windows community and cost-wise.
Finally, last week I published and article over on Debian-Administration.org:
Software RAID5 and LVM with the Etch Installer
So far the comments have been good and/or helpful. No one has said anything bad! Yay! Actually, I didn’t really expect people to say bad things, I didn’t know about this site until my boss told me about it a month ago, and I’ve since been impressed with the quality of the posted articles and the feedback they receive. It’s been added to my RSS reader.