I use linux as my main OS at home, but have a windows partition for movie maker and steam games. Well I had an old 5,400 RPM 100 GB drive in there and the MBR got written to it somehow on my last install. I wanted to get that out of my system and figures I would enjoy Hardy Heron since it is pretty much done (been using it on my laptop for months).

XP was easy and so was the ubuntu install. I have a 300 GB second drive that holds all my data so there was not need to create a separate home partition. It is formatted fat32 so both OS’s can use it. After loading up the nvidia driver I set up dual screens with the nvidia settings GUI, no need to edit xorg.conf, which was really nice. Compiz is enabled by default and I bumped it up to the cube by installing CSM. I have a canon printer which has heen a headache in earlier ubuntu installs. This time it was ready to go out of the gates, drivers and all. All I had to do was click make it my default and all was well. Lets see windows do that.

Downloaded ubuntu Hardy alpha 6 for the laptop. It is pretty darn cool from what I have seen. Got wireless, compiz, the new gnome, and firefox 3 on it. Had a bit of an issue with scim messing with my language, but got rid of that. Took me a bit to get the xorg working well since I did not notice there is a new way to do it graphically. The nvidia settings GUI got my resolution correct which is a first. No hacking necessary.

I picked up everything with ease. This will be the next LTS distro so they are making it pretty cool.
Gotta love an OS that puts out a new version every 6 months. I am not ready to switch at work yet since I doubt vmware server is ready for Hardy yet. Still for my home PC it works great.

Impressed I am.

I love to show my flippy cube to people. My dad was pretty stunned to see it. Well they keep making it cooler and cooler. This is just a screen saver and not all that cool, but they keep coming up with cool stuff and I am pretty excited to see what the future holds. More here

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Sure you have to wear the red / blue glasses, but this seems pretty cool.
Anyone know where I can get me a pair of those glasses? A fosters home for imaginary friends was done in 3D and I bet it would of been cool.

As the picture above shows, Linux is friendly with windows. I run XP virtual machines inside ubuntu rather than booting into windows. I dual boot and XP has a small partition for gaming purposes. Well Friday night I decided to wipe my whole system cuz it had Windows Vista and Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on there. Vista was such a pile of crap. It ran so slow and was annoying as hell. Gusty Gibbon, the new release of ubuntu was out and I wanted to go with that. I wanted to get XP back on there so I could get the new HL2 loaded up on there.

I was hoping the next version of ubuntu would be goofy gopher, but a flatulent primate aint half bad.

The NIC in my laptop went bad and I had some severe issues getting the current version of ubuntu to work with wireless, let alone load. We needed to get the laptop working for our trip and I am not gonna use windows on vacation.

Well loaded up gusty without issues and wireless worked out of the box. So did my graphics and compiz. Pretty fricking happy.

10 things linux users do not tell ya when bragging.

3. You will have to learn how to use the command line.

Regardless of how GUIfied Linuxes have become, a lot of operations still require the command line, so you better be ready to learn how to use it. Besides, in the strange occurrence of a system crash, chances are it will revert to a stable command line interface. We don’t tell you this because we, hardcore Linux users, *love* the command line, and the power of the command line is one of the major appeals of Linux. We truly believe everyone should love the command line as much as we do.

And I guess I will add more.

1. Linux does crash, sort of. The window manager (the GUI) can have issues, especially if you are using compiz, beryl, compiz fusion, or another cool one. On a windows box this would cause you to have to reboot. In linux you just restart X. This can be as simple as pressing alt + ctrl + backspace or entering “sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart” from a CLI. It is pretty fast, way faster than a reboot. Plus say you had a virtual machine running, it will still be running.

2. with so many different distro’s you might have problems running programs you download. Packages come in different flavors. You got .deb’s, RPM’s, and just source packages. Most can be converted easy though. And 99% of the packages you install will be available from your package manager.

3. not all linux ladies are hotties, cept for my wife that is

Now don’t get me wrong, it was pretty cool. Actually really cool. The merging of beryl and compiz means there are so many plugins that it will make your head spin. But spinning is the problem. I run dual screens and compiz fusion does not support a big cube (spans both monitors as one cube) yet. So although I had a 4 sided cube each screen was actually an eight sided cube and were opposites of each other. Does that make sense? Well it was just annoying. It is a bug they know about and will fix here soon.

Thing is they do not even have an official release yet, it is in beta currently. They should have a stable version here soon since it is going to be included in ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon. I will use it when they fix the dual monitor thing. Cool thing is I have both installed and can switch between them, so no headaches there.

Ubuntu install, which works really nice since it is still the apt-get way. none of that tricky git stuff.

EDIT: well I am now switching back and forth. Still the multi cube irks me, but they are working on it.

EDIT II: looks like somebody found a workaround.
CCSM –> general options –> display settings –> uncheck detect outputs

there is one drawback. It does not recognize the separation of your monitors, so a maximized app will span both. Still better than having this.

beryl and compiz merged They are now called compiz fusion

more info and how to install over at opencomposting (forums)

nice vid showing off some of the new plugins

So I got in trouble with my webhost last week. Removed the automatix and compiz / beryl repo’s that were pretty much dead. Worked with some dreamhost users on how to block the 1.5 million hits those got per month. Used google webmaster tools to remove any reference to those dir’s from google. That is pretty cool that you can do that. Updated my wordpress blog. And figured out how to use the widgets in wordpress.

The widgets be my problem right now. They are pretty cool and I want to start using them. So I have been messing around with some different themes. My current theme has a few issues with the widgets and I have thought about switching the look of BorK anyway. So if it looks strange here, do not fret. it is just me messing with stuff trying to make it look purdy.