HI SYN!

Ubuntu: Thursday

So far so good. This is basically the half way point of this short-holiday week and since work is crazy busy I haven't been able to post about how it goes. My test system is as follows: AMD 3200XP 768MB DDR1 Memory 80GB IDE Harddrive Nvidia FX5200 Graphics Card Onboard Sound Ideq Case (and mini-PSU) Gnome feels very responsive for such a 'slow' system and initially I wasn't using the accelerated X video driver ad though the system was half decent so I'm guessing with the right video card this setup would be fine on a Pentium 3! So far it's been pretty much eye opening as the last time I used Gnome, everything was heavy feeling and very slow. It seems unlike Microsoft, the coders actually optimized code over time - oh my, what a unique idea! ;) For me, using Linux on the desktop again has been great, and thus far I feel like I am much more productive for work in this environment. Speaking of work, it's calling so until later today!

Ubuntu: The experiment

So, it's been around 8 years since I've actually used an OS other than Windows for anything more than a server. Yet here I am, typing this on a freshly installed Ubuntu 7.04 system. I've been sitting here playing with it off and on all Sunday afternoon and have come to the conclusion that I need to give Linux another try as a desktop/workstation OS that just works. I really hope this works out, I truely do. Most times during the work day, I despise having to use Windows for most of my work tasks since I'm 99% of the time working on a UNIX box remotely. Wether it's a company box in Dallas, Frankfurt or China I've been using putty to remote in to do all work on the servers. Not that using a terminal SSH session will be a different feel from putty, but the environment around that session definitely will. So here we go, a week of nothing but Ubuntu for all things work related, starting Tuesday technically but I have a feeling I will be extending this experiment to any time I touch a computer, outside of video games.

The CentOS switch

I feel like I've done something incredibly stupid now, yesterday I decided 'hey lets switch the fileserver to CentOS' . The reasons I decided to switch away from BSD on my fileserver was so I could be on the same platform as work and I actually like this OS for a server. I made the call the other day to eventually have all servers for work (currently around 25worldwide) switched over to CentOS from Fedora Core and RedHat 9. CentOS is just RHEL (Redhat Enterprise Linux) stripped of all mention of Redhat and all other trademark content removed. I gotta say, this is what I remember linux being like. Stupid me though decides to change the OS on a 1.5TB fileserver over without actually making sure Linux can read AND write to a UFS2 filesystem.... definitely my bad. I stupidly thought linux would support reading and writing to that filesystem so I could leave the RAID array alone. Oh well, another 3 hours till a 600GB data transfer is done and I can get cracking on the reinstall.

"Alternate" OSes

I played around with DesktopBSD and PC-BSD for a while and found that I hated PC-BSD. I truely do not like it's custom package system as it destroys the beauty that is *BSD, ports+packages. DesktopBSD impressed me more, even if it's a bit behind in the times I found the OS completely usable and updatable from the GUI interface. In fact, I decided to run a test with it and installed it on a File server, Tera, I was putting together. I was going to go with my trusty FreeBSD install or possibly a Fedora Core 6 install (since I work with FC a lot for work) but decided to try something different. My thinking here was "could this OS be useful in the SOHO/small business environment" and so far after 2 months of running it this way I'd have to say yes. I've tried to use the GUI to do most software updating or installing, rather then the usual command line and haven't run into any major road blocks. I need to do more SAMBA configuring via the GUI though to see if this could really be used in SOHO environment for non-uber geeks But lately something has been nagging me, especially after I tried installing Fedora Core with desktop apps then a Ubuntu Desktop install... are Linux distros so far ahead in the race for the SOHO/Small Biz market that DesktopBSD could never break in? I'm considering taking out my DesktopBSD OS drive and installing a Ubuntu Server (with GUI) on the server to find out. That is assuming I can be 100% sure that my software RAID 5 drives (4x500GB) will not be touched. This is definitely something on my to do list...