The First Week With Linux

It’s been a few days now since I installed Linux at home as a primary operating system on the desktop PC, so I thought it might be valuable to record a few observations. Google Chrome was the first app I installed. Synching worked perfectly “ all bookmarks, history, and extensions appeared, and worked correctly straight away. Win. I mounted the MyBookWorld NAS through fstab “ which means it’s always available as a drive share for anybody using the machine, and CrashPlan can include it’s contents in the backup. This essentially means we’ve finally moved the photos off the desktop PC. Huge win. CrashPlan installed with no significant issues, and continues to work perfectly each night. “Adopting” the previous Windows backup has caused it to accelerate the backup process tremendously. DynDNS installed without problems, and after a little monkeying with the firewall, I am now able to SSH to the desktop machine from wherever I am in the world (even from my phone “ I found a great SSH client for Android called ConnectBot). DropBox works flawlessly (but then I knew it would “ I have used in on Linux machines since it was launched). Ubuntu One appears to work, but I’ve not really stretched it’s legs yet “ I’m only using it in the same manner as DropBox thus far; it can do far more in terms of synchronising contacts, etc. (which I don’t really need, because I use Google Mail, Contacts, Calendar, etc). The Fuji/Xerox driver for the networked Dell 1320C laser printer in the study worked perfectly after a little fiddling. Google Picasa for Linux is awful. Thankfully I can run PhotoScape through the Wine emulation layer. It won’t save (because it doesn’t know how to deal with Unix permissions), but it can export via the clipboard to The Gimp to look after that. In summary, 99% of the switch from Windows to Linux has been a huge win. I’m resisting installing VirtualBox (emulator) until I need it “ and then I’ll be reporting on how well a Windows 7 machine runs on top of Ubuntu. I guess I should check the memory limit of the desktop machine “ now it’s running a more stable OS, it would make sense to max it out.