Ubuntu Thoughts (plus Photoshop CS2 on Wine!)

So, I've gone Linux.

Well, it's not my first time. Nor can I truly predict at this point whether it's safe to say I'm done with Windows, but at least for this summer, my goal is to not have to boot into Vista for any reason.

So far, so good.

Technically, I've installed Ubuntu Studio, a sorta sister distro of Ubuntu. It's based on the latest 8.04 release, which I admit I DID try to install, but after continual mishaps with the Live CD installer, Ubuntu Studio's installer worked on the first try and has a few nice perks so I see no reason to ditch it.



My hardware often clashed with Linux. I've had network issues, with some ethernet cards (often onboard ports) not working at all. I've had sound issues, which took me a LONG time to figure out (turned out the ALSA mixer had an extra channel full of fuzz turned up the whole way). I've had graphics card issues, especially with my X800, and having to manually configure X after installing. Mounting hard drives was the worst - I've been specifically putting all my files and media on a separate partition for both windows and linux to access, but it was always a supreme pain to mount them and have to keep 'em in fat32.

And on the software side of things, Firefox 2 always seemed sluggish, Flash was a bitch, GAIM left me wanting more, and installing programs just confused me. And fonts looked nasty.

But it's been a few years since I've done more than just muck about with live CDs - I built a FreeBSD/XFCE desktop from the ground up back in maybe '05, and that was about as far as I went.

It probably helps that I recently (around christmas) put together a brand new system, with a Gigabyte mobo, Core 2 Duo chip, 8800GT, 2 gigs ram, sata hard drives, and so on. But the installation was the cleanest ever. In fact, all those niggling issues I had in the past were essentially GONE. With absolutely no extra steps, my sound worked perfect, I connected to the net instantly (and strangely, a lot faster than in Windows), my partitions (NTFS, now) were detected instantly and mounted painlessly, my graphics card displayed the best resolution even before downloading proprietary drivers (again, straightforward, too!)....... remarkable.



Pidgin (previously GAIM) has become my IM client of choice over the years, so I welcome it, and Firefox 3 works as brilliantly on Linux as it does on Windows. Flash actually works, too!!! Amarok is an easy transition from WinAmp and its cover manager is solid compared to winamp's AlbumList. After installing some TTF fonts, everything is looking sharp. VLC is working better than ever, Google Earth is available, Hamachi seems to work ... and of course my favorite notepad app, Tomboy Notes, is there. I really love the customization potential of the gnome panel.

Oh, and Compiz is awesome. Wiggly windows!

Installing programs via Add/Remove and Synaptic is ten times better than searching out programs on the web and its library is quite expansive. Even Wine-Doors, a gui installer for wine, can download certain programs. I used it to download Photoshop CS2, after reading various blog posts about the general not-working-ness of CS3, and was surprised to see it ACTUALLY DOWNLOAD IT. Sans keygen of course, but still cool.



I also tried to install Steam. Download speeds were insane. I never get more than 200 KB/s on this connection - at least in Windows - and all of a sudden Team Fortress 2 is downloading at not 200, not 500, not 900, but 1.1 MB/s!!! WHAT?! ... Awesome.

Well, I haven't really ironed out the bugs with TF2. It sort of runs, albeit with all the HUD blacked out, and it seems to crash when I change the textures from Low quality to, well, anything else. Still, a good start.

Photoshop CS2 crashed the first few times I tried to run it but after a restart it seems to work quite well. Performance seems good. Mouse control might not be QUITE as smooth as it is natively, but still good enough I could draw this bear. The filter gallery works fine as well.


So, I'll keep you updated. Next on my list of things-to-do is get VMWare or something up and running so I can edit video in Premiere CS3. I'd also love for Soundbooth to work.