Ubuntu as a Workstation

One thing that has never lasted more than a few weeks for me is using Linux as a main desktop. I've given up hope that I'll be able to run it at home full time until WineX/Cedega is up to snuff to run Sims 2, though my hopes are that it is not far off.

What I have been able to do, in the course of testing evil mechinations out at work, is try to use Linux 100%. At this point I'm counting myself at 99% as there is one set of applications that won't work under Linux as far as I know. Otherwise, everything has been going fairly smoothly.

I install Ubunutu 6.06 (my favorite distro) on my machine after moving my XP machine to a VMWare Virtual Machine on our ESX server using Ultimate P2V (which is free minus having to own Ghost 8). Worse case scenario I could move my machine back to the physical one if I needed, but I really didn't want to.

As expected, the install gave me just about everything I needed, especially after running Automatix. I also got brave since my real machine was safely backed up and working on the ESX server and set up AIGLX and Compiz on the machine for all of those nifty wobbly effects and eye candy that I have wanted for oh-so-long. All in all it took about a day before I got everything all nice and ironed out.

I connected to the shares that I needed to via our file server, I was able to remote desktop into my VM'ed XP machine, I could print, and I could open up all the documents that I needed, and all with the eye-candy that I could only hope for in XP. I've been a big fan of Expose in OS X for quite a while, and with AIGLX I get that. I also find myself using ALT+SCROLLWHEEL to make windows transparent more and more often.

We use Linux for almost all of the servers at work, so I wasn't totally worried about being able to integrate with the network. All I have left to do is get set up in the backup system so that my machine is getting backed up at night.