Saturday, January 27, 2007

Converted from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux

I'm now running Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on my Dell Inspiron 6000 notebook computer. I have named this computer Mercury (as opposed to Pericles, the Ubuntu web server that I've been writing about thus far.)

There were a couple pieces of hardware that I had to tinker with in order to get it working or optimized:
  • Wireless: BCM4318 AirForce One 54g 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller
  • Graphics: Intel Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller
Here is a list of the software I'm running on the system so far. This list isn't exhaustive, but basically includes things I frequently use and things that I had to deliberately install:
  • Gnome (desktop environment)
  • Mozilla Firefox (web browser)
  • Evolution Mail
  • Kopete (with MSN, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and IRC connections.)
  • Tomboy Notes (a Wiki-like sticky note applet)
  • gnubiff (a tray notification tool to make a penguin dance if I have any email.)
  • xmms (music player)
  • Totem xine (movie player)
  • Codecs for virtually all Windows and Macintosh audio and video formats and full DVD playback.
  • wine (a windows API replacement layer to support a few windows apps that I still use.)
  • VirtualDub (a GPL'ed video manipulation program for Windows. I run this through wine.)
  • Internet Explorer 6 (I use this to test the websites I develop for my business. It also runs through wine, and I installed it using the very convenient IEs4Linux script.)
  • vmware player (I have it set up to boot off of a 6GB raw SCSI partition, with the MBR and other partitions mapped to zero so they cannot be affected by the virtual machine. I use this to run a few design tools that I don't have functional Linux equivalents for yet.)
  • Compiz (eye candy for Linux.)
I will be following this up with a series of posts to explain how I have already (or will yet) accomplish any non-trivial configuration tasks.

1 comment:

Vincent Povirk said...

You should use real Windows to test IE, either by dual booting or with a virtual machine. I've been told that although IE6 runs in Wine, it renders the pages differently on Wine from how it does on Windows.