Back and forth back and forth…for the past 6 months I have been teetering on whether I want to dive head first into Linux. As with many others who take the plung, I seem to have this strange clinch of…”but what am I going to do without [insert Windows software title here]?!?!”
I’m inspired to make this work though. I think my last straw with Microsoft was installing Vista x64 on my IBM Lenovo X60 1709-CTO and discovering upon installing Microsoft Office that not all of the features work, and that it’s known by Microsoft that thier Office suite isn’t 100% compatible with Vista x64. HELLO?! Talk about the right hand not communicating with the left. So, with the recent release of Ubuntu 8.04, I decided it was time to take the plunge. Mind you that I have installed previous versions of Ubuntu on my laptop before and never really quite satisfied, but I’m giving 8.04 a better chance.
The first big hangup of the installation was getting my wireless card installed correctly. With the help of ThinkWiki.org, I got the wireless all up and going. I’ve installed a host of software that everybody raves about, and we’re going to be a little more committed. The remaining issue I have is with my built in Sierra Wireless EVDO card for Verizon. To much frustration, and the disappointment that I had to reinstall Windows on a new partition just to turn the power on to my card after continually getting “NO CARRIER”, I’m finally able to connect and get IP addresses from Verizon. I can even ping through it, but I can’t get every other internet software to be routed through it. Secondly, it disconnects after 2.5 minutes of being connect. Working out the bugs with that. Looks like this doc might lead me in the right direction…
I already have an existing CentOS 5.1 server running Asterisk with several VoIP phones scattered throughout the country for Sators.com running smooth and I gave myself the pat on the back after getting that all setup. I previously had all of my working files for development and my documents stored on a Buffalo Linkstation with everybody talking gigabit to each other. That was fine and dandy, especially cause the Linkstation can talk Samba, but the main thing that I miss about a previous setup is having FTP users for each of my web clients for them to login, transfer content for the project, and it be delivered right to their client project folder for easy access. I was able to mount the Linkstation in CentOS and get FTP users to login and be mapped to the Linkstation, however the problem arose when files were tried to be uploaded. vsftpd tried to assign owner/permissions and the Linkstation not happy with that. So I scrounged up several hard drives that weren’t being used and used the CentOS Logical Volume Manager to create a Samba store drive that I mounted to /samba/ and spent the last 12 hours copying 125GB of data to the CentOS box and working on remapping everything. Thanks MDLog:/sysadmin.
I’m certainly not decided between GNOME and KDE. I definitely find myself switching back and forth, each one has their pros and cons, we’ll see where I end up over time. The next and final big daddy will be switching over my Desktop. That’s going to be a little slower process as that’s where the true bread and butter is earned and managed. I think I’ll start with the live CD and work my way down from there….we’ll see….”but what am I going to do without [insert Windows software title here]?!?!”
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