Logged in as Guest Sun, Oct. 21st, 7:42 AM.
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So, a little while back, I convince my wife that she shouldn't use Windows anymore. It took a little work on my end, but eventually, she came around. Once she had agreed, I did some research to figure out what was currently the most "user-friendly" Linux distro. The general consensus was that Ubuntu was the current leader. So, I set to work installing it on my dual cpu box. Now, not wanting to lose my ability to revert to Windows, I set it up as a dual-boot system with Ubuntu as the default. The overall installation was fairly painless. It took the usual 45 minutes which is about what I would expect. The next part however, took me by surprise. As it rebooted for the initial run, the console came up correctly, and each of the components (Apache, Cups, etc) seemed to load and start fine. However, when it went to start X, the screen just went black. The odd part was that the system didn't appear to be locked up. It responded to pings, the keyboard appeared to be responding, even the apache interface seemed to be active. Very strange. So, I went poking around the X configuration files (which had been set up automatically for me). I discovered that it had loaded an NVidia PCI video card driver. I started to scratch my head at that one because my video card was an AGP card. Then it hit me. I had previously set my machine up with dual video cards to use multi-monitor support on Windows. After a while, though, my desk required me to get rid of one of my monitors so in the end, I disconnected the monitor connected to my PCI card and proceeded to forget that I even had a PCI card. Doh! User error on my part. So, I yanked the PCI card and reinstalled Ubuntu again. This time, it detected the AGP card wonderfully, and everything after that worked superbly. Now, this is mostly chalked up to my fault, however, I really do believe that the X auto-setup wizard should default to the video card that my BIOS uses. Once I finally got into Ubuntu, I really liked what I saw. The interface was intuitive and the UI was crisp and clean. The only thing I had to do was to tell the CUPS (printing) interface which printer I had, and make my old Windows NTFS drives visible. Once I did that, my wife was ready to go. For about a week, the Linux Experiment went well. My wife really liked the UI and the browser (Firefox) and her overall reaction was positive. Then she wanted to work on one of her spreadsheets. No problem I though. I'll just install OpenOffice and she'll be set. So, I installed OpenOffice and then headed off to work. I hadn't been at work 30 minutes, when she called me and said 'What did you do to me? I can't use this!' Uh, oh. I asked her to tell me what was wrong, and she proceeded to rant about how awful the interface was. Then she hit me with the real big one: No Publisher equivalent. I convinced her to keep using it for a while and that she would get the hang of it and like it. In the mean time, I told her that I would look for a Publisher equivalent. I won't bore you with too many more details, but the punchline to this story is that there currently isn't a good replacement for Publisher on Linux. I searched for a long time, and the only solutions I could find were A. Running MS Office under Wine B. Crossover Office Unfortunately, I am by no means a Linux expert, and both of these solutions required some Heavy Lifting in regards to configuration and installation, and I didn't/don't have time to invest in researching these. In the end, my wife went back to Windows, and I went back to installing weekly MS security patches. Ugh. I guess that the summary of my experiment is that as an OS, the Ubuntu distribution of Linux is great to work and live in if you're mostly doing web work. The downside is that the applications that have become integral tools to a lot of people just aren't there for Linux. While there are work-arounds for a lot of these, there just isn't a quick and easy one click installation solution. Yet. |
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| Submitted by bosshogg on Wednesday the 31st 1970f December 1969, at 04:00 | |
