Computing

Moving Out: Switching from Windows to Ubuntu

By skenmy ⋅ April 20, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Switching to Ubuntu has been something I have planned for a long time. Now that I have practically finished my Sixth Form courses (and I have finished anything that I could need my PC for), I decided it was time to make the permanent switch. That’s right - after a few “trial moves”, i’ve finally moved out of Windows XP to Ubuntu Hardy.

I’m sure you’ve all seen 1001 different posts on peoples’ experience in switching to Linux from Windows, some good, some bad. My experience has generally been good - aside from having some initial sound problems (that eventually turned out to be a mixture of problems including wrong drivers going to wrong devices, and a short-circuit in my speakers), everything has been pretty smooth. I have quite literally started from scratch - the only things I backed up were my music collection, and a small number of important documents like my private key. It’s cleared a lot of the crap out of my system.

My music has imported smoothly into amaroK, my player of choice in Linux. I tried previously to get amaroK to work on Windows (as it can do, and will natively do in the future) - but failed at the last hurdle after a 13 hour rampage with portage on Windows. Not pretty. But that’s another story. I think things are starting to become a bit more “normal” for me now - apart from the occasional error message on login (which is to be expected on a Beta OS to be honest).

The one program I did install (infact, I think it was even before amaroK went on) was Conky. If you use Linux and haven’t tried or seen Conky before now, give it a try. It’s useful, but at the same time it’s pretty cool. There’s something to be said about having lots of graphical widgets showing your CPU in the style of a rev counter, or your temperature as a thermometer, but nothing really beats having it all printed out onto your desktop in plain old console font - with a few pretty graphs thrown in for good measure.

I’ll try and keep the blog up to date with my experiments and findings in Ubuntu. Just like everyone else

Tags: linux, os, ubuntu, windows