TechNayak(mirror)

Note : I blog on my personal space at riteshnayak.com/blog . This is a mirror of the content.

Yes, this weekend I indulged myself in some good old fashioned open source installations and it was really nice. I got myself a copy of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and wanted to try it out and boy, am I glad that I did.

For quite sometime I have been contemplating going open with my OS. Though I have legitimate copy of XP, I was tired of all the malware and spyware, plus there was the costs involved in buying other software required for the same. So I made a check list of the things that I used on an everyday basis, heres the list

Internet Connection, Browsers , media players ( audio, video), Office , Eclipse, Resin, Adobe Photoshop and acrobat, messengers, skype. I had heard of ubuntu a lot and wanted to try it out - I had heard it was really good with the system hardware. I got Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn release.

Booted with the CD and the first attraction was awaiting me. The OS boots from the CD and gives u a choice between installing the OS or exploring it. This was really nice considering that you can get a glimpse of the OS without actually installing it. I chose to install and trust me linux installations are a pain considering you need to diskpart and stuff, but ubuntu gave a nifty little utility which selects the install drive by itself. Within 20 mins my basic installation was done and I was on. My first criteria for survival was an Internet Connection, coz without it , there is no point to Linux on your desktop. Gave it my network settings and I was on . Plus my settings from XP had been imported - the users, bookmarks, pictures, documents etc which is very nifty considering you have to run mount commands to make your windows drive visible. Ubuntu went on to auto mount my drives and showed it on my desktop…now how cool is that ?

Next in the agenda was to tick my checklist of things that I needed :

• Internet Connection :done
• Browsers: Firefox 2 was by default shipped - but I also installed Flock just in case.
• Media players (audio, video): Now this was the funny part. Almost all the times I wanted to go Open , I was forced to come back due to the different media types m4a, aac, avi, divx etc etc. Windows codecs were life savers. My last experience with three flavors of Linux namely Red Hat 8, Fedora Core 3 and Suse has proven to be painstaking experiences. So I fire up Totem Music player and try an MP3, it doesn’t play but wait, there is a message saying we can look for things that could help you play this and I click yes. The utility searches through the user maintained repositories and gives me three plugins to install, I do so in like 20 seconds and what do you know all my songs and videos play. Hooray - one of the most important hurdles passed.
• Office: Open Office 2.2 packaged with Ubuntu comes with spreadsheets, presentations and also database (access). There is also Evolution mail client to substitute your outlook or you can use Thunderbird from mozilla.
• Eclipse : download the linux distros from hereÂ
• Â Resin /Tomcat - MySql - all have linux origins so that shouldnt be a problem
•  Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat : the Adobe pdf reader comes packaged and for photoshop functionalities you have Gimp the Gnome equivalent, again packaged with ubuntu
• Messengers : now there is the packaged Gaim which can connect to almost all known messenger servers including MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk through Jabber, ICQ etc. Even if you dont have this then you can use pidgin client which essentially does the same.
• Skype : download the debian installer from here.Â

So what more do you want. Go open and get Ubuntu. If you need my copy of Ubuntu then be sure to contact me.