Some of you may have already known that for the longest time my home PC was running on Windows ’98. Yep that’s right, Windows ’98, an eight year old operating system as of this writing. It was slow, it was buggy, it was unstable and man was it just a painful experience to work with. So why was I using it, and why did I ditch it now after eight years of enduring the pain?
I was using it because I bought Windows 3.1 when it was the state-of-the-art, then I upgraded it to Windows ’95 and then to ’98. You can probably tell that I don’t believe in software piracy. Anyway, so after I baught ’98, I just couldn’t afford to upgrade anymore. I mean, Windows is really expensive, especially at full price–they wouldn’t let me upgrade form ’98 to XP. So, I trudged along with ’98 for a few years until a very kind member of the family gave us the gift of a digital camera. Of course, the software it came with wouldn’t work with my OS (it went back to Windows ’98 SE, which stands for ‘Second Edition’, I have the first edition!).
I desperately wanted to dump the photos on the camera onto my computer, but wasn’t about to shell out hundreds of dollars on an OS upgrade. Especially because it wouldn’t end there, my PC is a Pentium II 300Mhz, hardly a powerful machine by today’s standards. So I looked into Linux. A friend and coworker of mine recently installed Ubuntu (a Linux distribution) on his workstation at work and told me how great it was. So that’s where I started. I went and downloaded the CD image from their site and after two failed attempts to burn the thing I finally got it right (thanks to a guy on #ubuntu!).
A breath of fresh air
I’ve got to tell you, Linux just rocks. It’s faster, more stable and I dare say “smarter” than Windows and I’ve only been using it for a day and a half! It’s as advanced as Windows XP (and from what I hear even Vista) and it works just fine on my “old” machine. Granted, I’ve got about 512MB of RAM, but hey it’s still a PII 300. I mean, I plugged my camera in and bam! no drivers or anything, it just showed me my pictures and asked me if I wanted to download them. And get this, you don’t have to reboot every time you install something! The one CD install of Ubuntu came not only with the OS (duh!), but with Open Office, and GIMP (an open source Photoshop equivalent). Two apps whose Windows counterparts would have knocked my wallet back into the stone age. Not to mention all of the open source software that’s available to download. And get this, I was able to run the OS from the CD before installing it in order to try it out! And if you can’t download and burn the CD yourself, they’ll ship it to you for free!
So as you can tell, I’m a little extatic about this whole transition. Yeah, there’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s well worth it now that my PC’s had new life breathed into it.★
Windows 98? Wow. A little behind the times there! That’s awesome.
is it user-friendly enough for the wife and kids?
Chris: Heh, I’m kicking myself for not having done this earlier (I had a Linux distro CD set in my drawer for years and never installed it!).
Marc: Surprisingly, it’s very user friendly. But like I said, it’s got a bit of a learning curve and I’m still trying to track down some equivalent apps for the ones I was used to on Windows.
And you know what? Concerning all your pictures, you now can install Google Picasa on Linux. How sweet hmm?
You can follow that link:
http://picasa.google.com/linux/
Or get it through Synaptic … so easy!
See you next week.
Dude, I tried to get suse10 64bit on the go a while back and borked my video settings.
I got myself a shiney keyboard but it was usb so I haven’t been able to play with a dual boot because for some reason it wasn’t usable until I was in an OS so couldn’t use the boot menu.
The upside is that I just plugged in a PS2 keyboard and I can now set up a dual boot and I just got the 64bit version of Ubuntu and am looking forward to playing with it so I can ditch windows completely.
Thanks for re-inspiring me to do it!!!
Good for you! I have been using Kubuntu on my laptop for over 2 years now and I love it
I keep XP on my home machine because I’m an avid gamer. If it wasn’t for games I would probably banish it from my hard drive long time ago.
Welcome to the fun side of life!
My studying machine runs linux for like 6 years now and boy what a difference.
I feel you when you say that “I don’t want to expend hundreds of bucks on an upgrade” because as a student, money isn’t something I have to burn that easily.
KDE has a whole bunch of windows equivalent software and so does Open Office (www.openoffice.org).
Once again, welcome to the fun side of life!
Welcome to Linux! Great success story for FOSS. Linux used to be way more difficult to install and use, but is has really improved in recent years. The advanced stuff is still hard, but the basic stuff is pretty easy now.
JS: Picasa RULES! It’s exactly what I needed. Thanks for the link!
Alan: Hmm, I didn’t run into any weird hardware problems (though I did burn the CD wrong twice!). I hope it works out for you!
Luke: Lucky for me I’m not much of a gamer. Though I do have a few strategy games I’ll miss… :’-( Then again, there is freeciv.. hehe.
Junior: Over the past couple of days, one term has stood out in my mind in relation to my past experience with Microsoft and company: “cost prohibitive”. On Linux, I’m inspired, and the tools are there for me to join the community and start contributing. Who knows, I might just start coding again! :-)
Quick update to do with my install… reburned a CD, installed and was up and running in minutes with my wireless etc.
my usb keyboard did wierd things after I ran the updates but I am sure I will suss that out in the end. I am now running on Kubuntu after a really easy installation going on the instructions on this page : http://monkeyblog.org/ubuntu/installing.html
Thought I would share it with you. Cheers!
Way to go! Ubuntu is a great distro: polished, complete, easy to maintain and I am sure you will not be disappointed.
I’m glad for you Ara. Me too – as I am sure a lot of other people – I thought time and time again of switching to Linux. Maybe I will revise it again when I buy my new pc in two months or so. However this time around I have few restrictions that I need to solve before I can switch. Perhaps in the end I will run my wife’s machine as winblows Xp and mine as linux?
1) I need some sophisticated software for managing photos. I have looked into http://www.photools.com/ ‘s Imatch software, which Iam currently evaluating. This seems to be the answer to my needs. As an avid photographer, I have now 12K photos on my HDD, and managing (and finding) the photos I need to find is starting to be impossible. And the collection will only grow. Google’s picassa – tried it. Deleted it. Wrote them my comments. It’s a ‘cute’ piece of software if you’ve got perhaps max 2-3K of pictures. Beyond that, it’s a pain in the ass and it does nothing for you to organize and find your pictures.
So I wonder if linux’ community has some software like that
2) C++ Development. I am trying to get back into coding C++; and also to use heavily metadata programming (templates in C++). Currently, from what I’ve seen, the only compiler that closest supports the ANSI C++ ’98 standard is MS’ VS2005. What alternative would there be in the linux world? I guess I’ll have to look into that.
In the end, I’ll perhaps do the dual boot thingy as so many others do. It shoudl be fun figuring out how to do that on 2 200Mb SATA drives where the first drive replicates onto the 2nd realtime for redundancy…
Btw, what storage media does your camera use? SD? Memory stick? PictureCard? or CF? With CF, you’re hassle free – just plug it in (even in windows) and it gets recognized as another external drive. With SD, I always had problems and you need to install some bogus crappy (with cute GUI) application I could care less for.