I love beryl

Just put beryl on the main family computer last night. It's great. The window switcher alone is worth the 10 minutes (if that) it took me to download and install. For those of you who are also running Linux Mint, the instructions for installing beryl are here. It was easy and quick- just copy and paste. I believe the method for installing on ubuntu is exactly the same.

If you decide to try beryl (and I highly recommend you do,) after you install and open the beryl-manager, hold down ctrl and alt and then right-click and move your mouse. You'll be pleased. :)

I'll write more soon about beryl. I'm still experimenting.

What is this thing, anyway?

The other day, a friend brought over an old computer that she didn't want. The windows 98 that was on it was not working properly (big surprise), and I didn't want to go through the pain to get it working since I was just going to install linux on it.

So I tried the new xubuntu, but it would just hang when I clicked install. This really confused me since the liveCD booted no problem. So I went and checked the xubuntu system requirements. It said you need 128mb RAM to boot the liveCD, but 196mb to install, and I had.... you guessed it.... 128mb!

But all was not lost! xubuntu offers an alternate cd for situations such as this. It offers an install using a text-based installer rather than the GUI (Graphical User Interface) on the regular cd. I installed and was up and running with no problem.

At this point, I became very curious about the hardware in the machine (mainly the processor speed.) On a windows machine, you could right click on "My Computer" and it would tell you information about the computer, but I didn't know the linux equivalent of that maneuver.

So, finally, on to the point of this post. I did some looking and found a great command to give you information about the hardware in a linux machine - lshw - just be sure to run it as root. For those of you scratching your head- Open a terminal and type:

sudo lshw

This will tell you more than you probably ever wanted to know about your hardware.

If this doesn't work for you, you probably don't have lshw installed. You can do this easily by searching for "lshw" in the package manager, checking the box next to it and clicking "Apply."

Here goes!

So the first thing I needed to do was move all my files (music, documents, etc.) to my external usb hard drive because I would need to reformat that drive in order to install linux. As I did this, I found that several of the folders with music files in them would not copy or even open. Luckily, I had most of that music saved somewhere else, but it did show me that the drive was in need of some work anyway, so this linux install was looking like a better idea already.

One thing I'll mention right now that I didn't know when I started is that windows and linux use different filesystems. Chances are any newer windows drive is formatted NTFS, but linux uses ext3. As of right now, linux (without some help from some software) only mounts NTFS drives as read-only, which means that you can open the files on the drive, but no changes can be made to any of the files and no new files can be saved to the drive. Linux Mint (available at linuxmint.com) is one version that comes with a utility for mounting NTFS drives read-write right out of the box if this is especially important for you. As far as I can tell (although I'm not totally sure about this) windows doesn't recognize the linux filesystem at all.

I had installed ubuntu on a different computer and couldn't figure out how to install some drivers necessary for viewing web pages (java, flash, embedded windows video.) This was totally unacceptable to me and fed my fear of switching, as everything I saw on the web about it was command line stuff with lots of sudo's and such. I envisioned hours of searching the web for the appropriate commands and endless frustration when it still didn't work.

Then my computer programmer friend sent me a link to the Linux Mint website. Mint is an altered version of ubuntu that includes all of these drivers, as well as the NTFS and FAT drive mounting utility I mentioned above and even some common wireless drivers. We installed it on the machine we on which had previously put the ubuntu, and it worked great right out of the box, so I decided to use it for the family computer at home.

Just a moment to assure you that I'm not a Linux Mint salesman. Lately, ubuntu has released their new feisty fawn version that has made installing plugins, drivers, and codecs easier, and I'm a big fan. I'm also a very big fan of the xubuntu version which uses the xfce desktop instead of gnome. I recently installed the alternate version of xubuntu on a machine with only 128mb of ram that I friend gave to me and was watching streaming video on the web in less than 45 minutes! You couldn't even wipe your ass running windows with 128mb ram!

I'd speak about installing the linux mint on the family machine, but there's really not much to say. It was pretty easy; since I was just going to erase the whole drive, I could use the guided partitioning using the entire disk (the partitioning seems to me to be the hardest part of the install.) Everything went smoothly and in about twenty minutes, I had a brand new linux mint os. I plugged in my ethernet cable, opened firefox and checked my email.

It was a beautiful day.

I've really done it now...

Well, here goes.

This is the running story of my switch from the Windows operating system to the linux operating system (from now on, I will just say OS.)
I'll start with a little background info.

I'm a first year computer science student at Southern Oregon University. I'm married to an extremely non-technical woman and have a brilliant baby girl. Until very recently, my experience with linux was limited to having some fedora cds that a friend gave me. He even made a partition on my hard drive in which to install a second linux OS, but I was consumed with fear.

A second os? Wouldn't that mess up the Windows os? How does this work? How do I tell it which one to boot? If my Windows programs won't work, what programs will I use? And finally (and most importantly) what does it look like?

I knew I could probably find out all of the technical things I needed on the web, but there was one more consideration...my non-technical wife. If she couldn't check her email or get to her lyric sheets, there would be hell to pay.

So right about now you may be asking yourself, "Why would someone with a perfectly good Windows XP system want to go through the trouble of figuring all of this out?" Well, there are two reasons:
1. I have a deep hatred of everything corporate, and what could be more corporate than Microsoft?
2. I've had trouble with viruses, spyware, etc. It got to the point where I was running a ridiculous number of anti-this-and-that programs, all of which seemed to do nothing, and I had heard that linux was impervious to such attacks.

Finally, after going back to school and meeting a friend that's a computer programmer here in town, I decided I should do it... I should switch the family computer to linux. (Well, all of those reasons combined with the fact that my Windows os had slowed to the point that I couldn't even successfully burn a cd.)

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.