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