Move over, Windows

Just bought a new notebook computer: Compaq CQ60-101-AU Athlon Dual Core 64 bit. After trying out Windows XP Home I finally settled on Ubuntu. I thought of starting this blog to record and share my experience.

Installing the drivers for Windows was a nightmare but it is possible. There is a blog out there which lists all the drivers to download. The drivers must be put in the right sequence and one must follow every instruction carefully. The Atheros wireless driver listed there was wrong. So I downloaded the one from the HP Compaq site after searching for it via Google. Strangely enough it is not directly listed on their site. So if you were to dutifully browse for the software on the Compaq site for the CQ60 model, you probably may not find that Atheros driver. Moreover, the driver is supposed to be only for Vista. But what the heck, I tried it out at 5.00am after many frustrating hours and sure enough it worked for me even for Windows XP Home. So much for user friendly help.

Anyway after all that work; I finally threw out Windows XP Home. Reason? The ass$%$% of the Microsoft help fellow simply hung up on me. He did not believe that I had broken my original Windows XP Home CD and I was using my friends CD (though my own license) for installing. So much for honesty.

Anyway, I thought it was high time that I did move onto Linux. All those crappy trojan and virus writers are having a field day on Windows. I had been looking at Linux since the time when it was that small lil' penguin. But it has grown up considerably. And lots of very important software that I need, like Ardour -- a music recording studio -- is available only on Linux. Bye-bye-Microsoft! Somebody should tell them to write better OS, and train their Bangalore staff better.

Ubuntu 8.1 installed in a breeze on my machine. 2 Gig RAM. Bloody hell. No driver to download. Nothing. At the first boot, it detected the NVIDIA card and asked me whether I should install the proprietary drivers from NVIDIA. (Most, if not all Linux are very evangelistic about being open source. They do not like proprietary stuff coming into their installations) In my excitement, I missed something and the driver did not get installed. On the second restart, I hunted around the Ubuntu interface and sure enough it was quite easy to find the required menu entry to re-invoke the NVIDIA driver installation request. This time around I got it right and I got a spiffy little machine with NVIDIA graphics working great. And that Atheros Wireless Card... well, what about it ? Nothing. Ubuntu had anyway recognized and installed the requisite driver the first round itself. (Here I am sticking my tongue out at Windows)

Now about the software. There is this myth that Linux has very little software. That is really weird. If you take a look at the Add/Remove Application menu you will see the tons of stuff that are available. I quickly installed all the apps that I wanted. I fumbled a bit at a web camera movie making utility. I thought that none were existing for Linux. There were some references to using VLC and Mencoder and such like. But they were so full of Linux jargon that they were not for me. Though I did install VLC and I've used it on Windows: It is one of the most powerful applications in that genre. I almost gave up my dreams of making cute little Youtube presentation till I came across this cheeky application called Cheese from projects.gnome.org Wow. Talk about simplicity.

After all that, I needed to run some apps from my old Windows machine. Thankfully, I don't install software on any Windows machine. I use the portable versions of software that don't leave registry cruft. The only programs that I install on the main Windows machine are: a good anti-virus, Java, Free Download manager, Acrobat Reader, a registry cleaner and I try and avoid to the best possible all other installations. That is an excellent approach. I have this external hard-disk containing all the portable applications from portableapps.com and I carry that around and attach it anywhere I want. It does not require a powersupply and it is a good 320Gig Western Digital with a 2 year warranty. I have my data also on that drive. (Which I also back up on another; more rugged drive elsewhere)

So how do I run those portable apps? Some of them have direct equivalent in Ubuntu: Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. But I do have some that have no synonymous app in Linux. So here comes WINE, the windows emulator that I installed on my Ubuntu box. Then from winetricks.org I installed a utility called winetricks (huh... difficult to guess?) and downloaded and installed some esoteric components from the Microsoft arena; mainly scripting control which was required by one of the crucial apps that I had written.

Now I am in business and I can even pause for some wine!