Pushing To the Extreme

I have always chosen to live on the edge, pushing my machine to its limits. This goes back to my days with an Apple II when I added hardware and tinkered with both hardware and software, always trying to coax a little more out of it. When Windows came onto the scene, I was forever crashing it and re-installing it due to things that I had experimented with. That did not go over too well when it we had only one machine in the house.

Now, we have more computers than people in the house and each computer has multiple hard drives. I can tinker to my heart’s content without inconveniencing anyone else. I would like to claim that we are a Windows free house, but that is far from the case. My wife uses Windows and my daughter uses it when she comes home from university. I prefer Linux, lots of it!

I have Linux running on two of four computers. My own computer is not leading edge. It is a two year old HP Pavilion with added RAM, an additional hard drive and a Nvidia 512 MB 3D card.

I no longer try to crash Windows. I spend too much time trying to rescue friends with Windows machines. It no longer is fun. Since I discovered Linux, Windows is just plain drudgery.

So I push the envelope on my own computer. I try to keep the others stable and running smoothly as possible which is a challenge since they all run Windows as their main OS. Add to this the headache of security problems due to file sharing and the habits of an eighteen year old daughter and it can be daunting.

Right now, I am running Hardy Heron Ubuntu which is still in alpha testing. It is still buggy and crashes frequently. I have KDE 4 running and it is limiting because it lacks features that I am used to in KDE 3 or Gnome. Simple things like cycling the wallpaper are not working yet. Also I cannot install all of the modules of KDE 4 yet due to dependency errors. For this reason, I prefer to use KDE 3 or Gnome, which I am using right now.

I am running Ubuntu Ultimate Edition as my main distro. It is working fine. It has some nice features such as multimedia that works out of the box without having to add anything. It has a cool theme which I kept for awhile, but dumped in favour of one that is not so dark. After all, it is dark this time of year in these northern latitudes. I like to lighten things up.

I have Compiz-Fusion working perfectly. I have every conceivable toy installed. Isn’t that what computers are for? Playing. I have Automatix2 and CNR working well. I also have Klik, autopackage, getdeb and Wine-Doors to play with. Choice is what running Linux is all about. Pushing things to the extreme is all about taking advantage of every opportunity to explore and discover. Life is good!

I have VMWare Server installed and still use an old Windows XP virtual machine which I have carted around from drive to drive without problems for a couple of years. I also have Virtual Box which also works fine. It seems a bit faster than VMWare, but I like VMWare a bit more. I tried Parallels, but dumped it. It locked up my computer while it was trying to install XP. That takes some doing. It has rarely happened before. Sometimes X freezes and I have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but I never have to power off to get out of Linux. I didn’t bother to troubleshoot it. It wasn’t worth the hassle since VMWare and Virtual Box work so well.

My Windows XP Virtual Machine is a 20 GB installation. It has everything I need in it from the Windows world. It runs at near native speed because I gave it 512 MBs of RAM. I have photo editors, filters, DVD copiers and all of the Office software I will ever need. It has every possible Windows browser installed. The funny thing is that they aren’t as much fun as the programs that I have in Linux, so I use Linux and my VM sits idle.

I still have Suse 10.3 installed on one partition. I can’t quite bring myself to installing over it. It is so beautiful and YAST is so good. I think that SUSE is leading the way in many respects. Canonical could learn a few tricks from Novell. Ubuntu could use a few tools of its own instead of the ones that come with the desktop of choice. Other top distros such as PCLinuxOS and MEPIS have great tools that set them apart from the competition.

Speaking of SimplyMEPIS, I have version 7.0 installed and am in love with MEPIS all over again. It is a solid contender for the Linux crown. I have not quite made the switch from Ubuntu 7.10, but I like it enough that it will be a keeper. The look is much improved. The hardware detection is as ever solid. It has big repositories because it is Debian. I have almost everything running in it that is in my Ubuntu Ultimate. Which brings me to the crux of the matter. I can’t quite bring myself to leave Ubuntu because it is the biggest. It simply has the most to offer at this point.

I scrapped PCLinuxOS. It was a good distro, but it was falling behind the others. The repositories seldom had any updates, even if I just booted into it weekly. I am not sure what is happening there. I know that there were daily security updates to Firefox and several others that should be updated in the repositories. Perhaps, this is the cost of small distros such as PCLinuxOS. They just don’t have the resources to stay current. Anyway, it is gone for now.

Next I would like to try Sabayon. It has been awhile since I used a Gentoo-based distro. It has a good rep. I would also like to try Elive and Linux Mint.

I may try to run them in a VM or I may have to say goodbye to SUSE which would make me sad. However, by that time OpenSUSE 11.0 should be out and who knows what will happen then?