Linux Orpdort!!

That's 'update' in Coach Z speak.

So, it's been quite a while since my last post. The good news is I haven't booted into Windows once since that post. As I discovered the other day, I apparently mucked up the boot manager when I did install ubuntu - so I couldn't have, at least until I fix that, anyway. Ha.

The other good news is that I love it. Really, I do. I didn't discover my Windows install was incapacitated until very recently because I didn't have any desire to boot into Windows at all.

So why DID I?

Well, games. Yeah, games. On the bright side, it was only 'cause I couldn't figure out how to get TeamSpeak to work, and Steam was acting just a little funky (the chat wasn't working quite right, and I was trying to join a group of friend's game in TF2.) And Team Fortress 2 actually does work flawlessly, assuming you add -dxlevel 81 to the game's launch properties. Likewise for Half-Life 2 and its episodes. That's a big plus because they're really the only games I tend to have a hankering to play (or replay as it were). Unfortunately, some day I'm going to want to actually finish BioShock, and replay Crysis... but that day will not be today, at least not without getting Windows up and running.

Amarok is great. It was crashing on me often at the start, but after changing the audio engine to xine it's been solid as a rock. I think I like it better than Winamp, although Winamp's AlbumList addon trumps the Amarok cover manager in many ways. The Amarok 2 nightly right now is awfully buggy and still missing a lot of features, but maybe a solution will crop up. Either way - no big deal.

I love the gnome-panel. I love how you can customize it to your heart's content. Task manager not where you want? Move it. System tray? Move it. Clock? Volume? You get the picture. The main menu is completely configurable, and it's terribly easy to add launchers to commonly used apps. But the best part are the apps you can add, super easily. Tomboy Notes is my favorite notepad-esque app ever. Glipper keeps a convenient drop-down of your copy/paste history. Phases of the Moon? Aww yeah. CPU stress indicator is handy, but the netspeed one lets me keep an eye on exactly how much data is going in and out of this machine, which is just plain invaluable.

Conky's real cool. I know a lot of people have it visible at all times, but I like to keep it in a compiz widget layer. Easily checked by tapping F9!

Flash support is decent. It varies. Sometimes Youtube vids play great, other times they look full of crappy artifacts or refuse to play. If you're scrolling down a page and there's an embedded vid, sometimes scrolling halts or gets real chunky.

Alas, there is Virtualbox. This is a whole 'nother article in itself. The idea is you install a new copy of Windows inside of your installation, and it works surprisingly well. I installed a (semi-hacked) copy of XP, and it runs as fast as any install of Windows I've ever used. Once you install the Virtualbox Guest Additions, you're able to access all of your folders as you normally would. And with the "Seamless" mode, it expands Windows to fill the entire screen, but lets you mix Windows windows with Linux windows! Just plain AWESOME. It works great on your second desktop.

Here's a short little video demonstrating it:


Half the time I keep Firefox running just because flash support trumps that of native linux. And for some reason I have terrible luck getting ANY of the eMusic.com download managers to work in linux, so I use the Windows version still.

Photoshop works quite well. So do most of the CS3 apps (Photoshop CS3 doesn't work in Wine, though CS2 does). I haven't done any REAL heavy lifting with Premiere Pro, but I had no problem splicing together some 300+mb clips and encoding the thing. (I do wonder what the encoding time would be like in a "real" windows install vs. the virtual one.)

It's a little questionable having only 2 gigs of RAM and having the virtualbox on quite often (as you can gather from the conky screenshot), but if I had 4 gigs I would have no qualms at all.

So, just a quick and dirty update. I don't know if anyone has even ever read this blog, but I guess I'll continue to (sporadically) keep it updated with my linux adventures and other GUI stuff that I've been neglecting.

PS. Compiz is AWESOME. Love the Domino effect, especially for opening windows.

PPS. Never really got those 1.1MB/s speeds much after the first few days of using ubuntu. I have NO idea where those came from.