Saturday, July 13, 2013

Relocating

WordPress
WordPress (Photo credit: Adriano Gasparri)
Hi folks,

Just wanted to let you all know that I'm switching back to Wordpress as my blogging platform. With my switching to linux and use of Blogilo, I've found that Blogilo doesn't seem to play nice with Blogger but crawls right into bed with Wordpress. I also discovered that Wordpress has some really cool features these days that Blogger doesn't offer.

I'll leave this site up for a while so people can update their bookmarks. There won't be any new posts to this blog.

  The new location is http://shulse.wordpress.com/

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Sunday, July 7, 2013

Moving from Windows to Linux - Some thoughts

Español: implantació de sistemes operatius
Español: implantació de sistemes operatius (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Moving from Windows to Linux can be a slightly overwhelming experience especially depending on the distro you go with. In this post, I hope to help you make that transition a little easier by providing you some things to think about before making that move.

As some of you are already aware, I've been in the process of moving from Windows to Linux. I haven't fully made that switch just yet as some of my work related functions require windows and I have some hobies or interests that strickly run on Windows and I haven't been able to get them to work well even in Wine. This has given me some insight into the relationship/dependency we have with Windows and why moving really isn't that easy of a switch for the average person.

Here are some of the issues I ran into while going through this process, you might experience them as well. The first thing I ran into was what distribution do I want to go with? Ubuntu is the big name out there for Linux but I tend to be a person who doesn't want to go mainstream, I want to run a solid yet cool distro, something different. What I found is that there are hundreds of flavors of Linux out there, all with their own unique features. This really made it confusing to me as I really didn't want to spend months trying them out until I found the one I liked best. Unfortunately I'm still distro hopping in search of that "perfect" distrobution. I have narrowed it down to Mint, Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Crunchbang. I like these becasue of what they have to offer. Mint seems to be the perfect setup with the Cinnamon desktop, very Windows 7 like and easy to figure out. Ubuntu has all the cool features but I hate the Unity desktop and don't really want to muck with installing a different one. OpenSuse is a new player, It's similar to Ubuntu but installation of software is different than Mint, Ubuntu and CrunchBang as those are all Debian based. (Debian is one of the main platforms Linux is built on, Fedora is what OpenSuse is built on.) CrucnhBang is a very light system and perfect for netbooks although the interface does take some work and isn't really for people just starting with Linux.

What my requirements for an OS is one that I can use on all my hardware, Desktop, laptop and netbook with minimal changes between them so my experience is a unified one. I have accepted that on my netbook I will have to run a different interface to help keep it light and less intensive on the system. This is why I kind of like OpenSuse, with their SuseStudio, one can build a version of OpenSuse to their liking. You don't have to have all the extra stuff and 20 different browsers installed. Currently I'm running Mint but may switch to OpenSuse once I get the hang of it.

The next thing I discovered is mindset. You do have to change your way of thinking with Linux, especially with the terminology. This I think is where most people get stuck. In Windows, one has become familiar with certain things and ways of doing stuff, In Linux, it's similar but the terminology or way of doing it gets confusing at first. However, once you get the hang of it it makes sense.

After that was command line. Unfortunately this is an area that Linux really needs to work on if they want to get grandma and grandpa to use it. There is still too much dependency on the command line.

Next up is software. Linux has made a huge leap from when I tried it 6 years ago. Installation of software has gotten so much better but here is where the terminology and process come back into play. It took me a while before I realized that software with a .deb extension was like a .exe extension in Windows and I could just double click it and it would install. (Note this is different in OpenSuse) That made things a lot better and easier for me to install applications. Another area that is a little hard to grasp at first is the software managers in Linux. All the software located in one location? Somethings not right there! But it is and it makes it nicer to have that instead of searching the internet for it. The only issue I have is the one off applications that aren't in the main repository. You have to add those manually and if not done right, well the noob is hosed and will hate linux.

Finally there is hardware. This has got to be one of the most annoying parts about linux. Granted Linux will run on pretty much anything out there but if you have specific needs (like gaming) you better have supported hardware! Video cards are the worst in regards to hardware support. I don't know what the deal is but both NVidia and ATI need to get it together and provide better support. When I did my first attempt to move to linux, I discovered that I wasn't able to run a VM with Windows 7 and install my video driver. It said it there was no hardware installed. I fought for weeks with this and discovered it's an issue with Oracle Virtualbox. Since my desktop is a pure AMD/ATI system, Virtualbox didn't support the cross over, it only supported Intel. So if I want to take advantage of my video card and the awesomeness of my system, I have to run Windows. I do wonder if maybe I need to do some tweaking with Virtualbox  or my system but I'll play with that later. (Just and FYI - My intent was to have Linux as my primary OS and run Windows in a VM for work and play.)

Hopefully this gives you a few things to think about if you are planning on moving to Linux before Windows 8 tries to take over. If you're not planning on doing any gaming or virtual stuff then you should be good to go. Linux can be a fun and useful alternative to Windows and once you get the hang of it, you may never go back!
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