Hello, Ubuntu

I’ve always been a devout Windows user. In my 10 or so years using computers, I’ve used pretty much explicitly Windows until recently.

The first system I used was my parents Windows 95 machine. I liked it because it had Solitaire. Then we moved up to Windows ME. Even at my young age I was smart enough to know Windows ME was horrible. But then XP came out. I liked it because it looked cooler, and was slightly faster than ME (give me a break i was still pretty young). I had some good times with Windows XP. When I finally got to the age where I realized I liked computers, We were still in the XP era. So I got pretty familiar with it. First I used it for games. But as things moved on, I spent my days fiddling around trying to set up a Ragnarok server on the machine. This got me more familiar.

Then Vista came out. Everyone was ripping it to shreds and I was hearing all sorts of terrible things about it. Unfortunately, while changing the PSU in my computer, I dropped the old PSU on top of the motherboard. It was dead. So my parents got me a new Dell, which of course, came with vista. At first I didn’t like Vista because they had changed the layout of everything, and I couldn’t find the things I wanted. Luckily that’s a simple problem and I got over that in a couple of days. After that, I learned to like vista, a lot. All the while I was growing used to the Windows environment and learning and learning more and more about computers and programming. And now of course, with about 5 years of programming under my belt, Windows 7 comes along!

Windows 7 is great. Its zippy. And I like some of the other features like the new task bar. I’ve been using Windows 7 since the beta, and I’ve been really happy with it.

So now I’ve spent 10 years in the windows environment and I’m quite comfortable with it. I’ve found a few things I like in each new version of Windows that comes out, and it keeps me happy for a little while longer each time. Unfortunately, after 10 years, I’ve grown bored of windows. I’m too comfy with it, and I feel like it’s time to try something new. Enter Ubuntu.

Now I’ve had little bits and pieces of Ubuntu (and a couple of other flavors of linux) experience thrown in with my 10 years of computing. I’ve had a couple VM’s with it, just to play around. I also worked with a Red Hat server at one of my jobs. But I’ve never really used linux more than part-time. Until now.

The other day, I took apart my main machine and made two out of it. I kept my windows machine in a usable condition (just in case) and I spawned a new computer, a linux box. I immediately installed Ubuntu. The installation went smoothly and was easier than I expected (I had had some trouble with it in the past). And just like that, I was up and running.

Things have run pretty smoothly since then, with only a couple glitches. The first thing I had to deal with was the nVidia drivers, which as I have learned are terrible for dual monitor support. When I had originally booted into Ubuntu, it had been using some standard graphics driver that seemed to do a pretty darn good job. It immediately recognized both of my monitors, and it was easy to set them up in the right position. However I then got a notice saying I should install my nVidia drivers. So I did, and thats where things went down hill.

After I got the driver installed, I restarted the computer and it booted into the OS, but this time, only one of my monitors worked. So I did some fiddling, but I could not, for the life of me, get it to recognize the second monitor. I got frustrated and realized, “Why am I bothering with this, I had a perfectly good, working solution before!”. I uninstalled the nVidia driver. And everything worked again.

So then I spent a day playing around, installing the programs I wanted, etc. And then I realized that the disc I had used to install ubuntu was the 9.04 disc. I went to the upgrade manager, and of course there was a button say “There is a new version of Ubuntu available, would you like to upgrade now?” (or something to that effect). I hit yes, and it did its thing for a while. Then it rebooted into the new version, and it worked just fine except for one thing. It had switched which monitor was the main monitor (the one with the application bars). This makes it slightly awkward to use, as my main monitor is now on the right instead of in the center. I still haven’t figured out how to change this (if you know, please leave a suggestion in a comment), but I’ve gotten used to it and it’s not so bad.

The last problem I discovered was that I had no sound. This was a problem. I did some internet searching and found that ALSA didn’t support my sound card, and I didn’t want to go buy one, so I took the advice of a friend and installed OSS4. Poof! sound works.

So I’m still getting adjusted, but I’m really liking the environment so far. The one thing I don’t like is all the dependencies you have to figure out. When I try to build an application, inevitably, I don’t have all the packages. And of course, I don’t have all the dependencies for those packages either. So I have to go lib-hunting. This was very frustrating. But I’ve been getting through it, and so far I’m quite happy with the switch.

I’m very excited to learn a new environment, and I’m having fun. If nothing else, it adds something to my resume.

Also, I have to give Ubuntu credit: Out of all the distro’s I’ve fiddled with, Ubuntu is one of the easiest and best supported ones. Hooray!