Computer Update

***Geek Warning***

Turn back now if you have no desire to read my comments regarding my latest PC adventure, or if tech talk makes your eyes glaze over...

I have been a Windows user for 14-15 years or so. I started with Windows 3.0 and upgrade to Win 3.1 a few months later. I did not have my own PC, but I borrowed my roommates while we shared an apartment and I had free use of one at my job at GTE Mobilnet. I graduated to Windows 95 shortly after it was released. I took the plunge and bought a P-120 with 32 megs of RAM and was in hog heaven for a while. Once I owned a PC, I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could about the hardware and the OS. Being self-taught means I made my share of mistakes, but nothing that I could not eventually recover from. It did not take me long to be very comfortable with Windows 95 and eventually Win 98, Win 98SE, Win ME, and Windows NT. I did not take the plunge into Windows 2000 until late 2002 for many reasons. I was getting rather tired of Windows and all the things that make it undesirable to me. We always had an extra PC in the house (usually an older one that I experimented on) and on many occasions, I would install some distribution of Linux (Redhat, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake) or some other operating system (BeOS) on it. No one OS stayed on the "sandbox" PC long. I usually borked it up and reloaded something else.

I eventually loaded Windows 2000 on our main PC (an old box, but it soon was upgraded) and played around with other OS's (SkyOS, Syllable, ReactOS, Lindows/Linspire, XandrOS, AROS) and some of the "live" Linux distros (Mepis, Knoppix). My fascination with other OS's was growing.

I finally upgraded our main PC to something with a bit more horsepower (Pentium 4 - 3 GHz, 512 RAM, 80 gig HD) than our old PC (Celeron 700 mhz, 256 RAM, 20 gig HD) and about a year after I upgraded, I bit the bullet and bought a *licensed* copy of Windows XP Professional. About the same time I did this, I wiped the sandbox (Celeron 400 mhz, 512 RAM, 10 gig HD) and installed a new Linux distro called Ubuntu. I was intrigued by this "user friendly" Linux distribution and wanted to learn more. I worked on it a bit every day, teaching myself more and more about Linux. I was beginning to like it. A lot.

Over the next couple of years, I upgraded Ubuntu to the latest version but continued to use our more powerful PC with Windows. I had a couple of hardware issues (the mobo died on me 2 months after the warranty expired) and installed some new hardware: router (the new one is wireless G), card reader (9 different types of cards), printer (HP photo), 160 gig SATA HD (to replace the 20 gig drive), mouse (new on is optical), speaker system (new one has a subwoofer), DVD-ROM (reader only), CD-ROM R/W (first one stopped writing) and a TV tuner card (which I broke by tilting the PC backwards too far and breaking the audio out connection).

I kept reading articles of people who gave up Windows to start using Linux. I was pretty sure that was not going to be possible (there is always something that you need a Windows box for, all my hard drives were NTFS and Linux will not write to NTFS), and my wife was not up to learning an new OS), but I wanted to use Linux as much as possible. The "sandbox" PC was not really powerful enough to do all that I wanted to do and it was pieced together with a lot of older, slower hardware. That made it less fun and more work. PC's are supposed to be fun.

I knew that dual-booting (the ability for a PC to load 2 different OS's) was possible, but the attempts I made in the past were not very successful. I then stumbled upon an article (on the Ubuntu Wiki) on how to dual boot Ubuntu painlessly. I read it an committed it to memory. I took the plunge. I dual-booted our fast PC with Linux and Windows.

I was nervous, but it worked. Most of my fears were alleviated when I booted the PC into Windows after I installed and did the basic Linux configuration. All the drive letters in Windows stayed the same, Windows booted just as it was supposed to, and nothing was lost.

I had a partition on /hda that was not being used, so what I did was boot windows, remove partition that I was not using (it was almost 40 gig, so it was big enough) and reboot. I inserted my Ubuntu CD and began the install process. Ubuntu saw that had Windows installed and configured GRUB to allow me to boot into Windows or Linux. I had to tweak the bootloader config file to tell it to boot Windows as the default (as not to confuse my beautiful wife), but other than that, everything worked as it was supposed to.

Ubuntu recognized my scanner (SANE is wonderful), both printers (both tested OK), my Logitech Quickcam (works in Camorama), and my SATA HD. I have not tested a few things yet like my card reader or my USB thumb drive, nor have I tried to synch my PDA with my Linux box. I have a lot of data and I do not want to lose it. One thing at time.

The major problem am having is writing to NTFS. All my data is on 2 partitions on the SATA HD which is formatted NTFS. I have installed a Linux program that is supposed to allow me to mount, read AND write NTFS partitions, but I have not been able to get it to work yet. I was rather tired and did not have as much time as I needed to do this properly.

I can read the data fine (I watched some of the recorded B5 episodes last night with Totem) I just do not know how to write to NTFS yet. Maybe this will be included in a future release or someone will make it easier to do.

Outside of those two things, I cannot see why I can't start using Linux as my primary OS. I will need to configure WINE to run the one small Windows program I use for finances, but I did that as a test on the sandbox and it worked very well.

Ok, my to do list so I can use Linux full time:

* Read/Write NTFS ability
* Synch my Palm T|3 / install software
* Configure WINE to run AceMoney
* Test USB thumb drive
* Test card reader

I think I have all the programs I need on Linux (all the software I need along with the OS is about 2 gig). The trick will be to learn them all. I did find that some of the wmv files I have do not have any audio and that may be troublesome (curse Billy boy and his proprietary formats). They work in Windows (duh) but no sound in Linux. Not all the wmv's, just a few.

OK, I am done rambling. I plan on spending the next few weeks tweaking. I will do this, eventually.