Devil Works

It’s day three and so far I’m pretty happy with my move to delete Vista from my laptop and install Ubuntu.

To follow up on the last post

• the screen brightness issue seems to have resolved itself.

• I haven’t fixed the wireless issue yet, but I have found the instructions… I have little motivation when I’m house sitting in a house with no wireless.
•  I realised that while twittering was fun, it didn’t deserve the effort to get tweetdeck working at this stage. I can still use twitter.com if I need a fix.

Some other things I’ve noticed

• Booting up and shutting down are really quick. I used to flick the power button and go and do something else for five minutes while it kicked itself into gear. I’m now patient enough to wait the 30 seconds for Ubuntu to load.
• I tried hibernate mode and it froze. Then I realised that I can shut down and reboot in the time it used to take Vista to wake up from Hibernate. There is also a menu option for Ubuntu to resume where you left off after a log out, but I haven’t tried this yet.
• Some of the keyboard shortcuts are different, but the only one I’m missing at the moment is using the backspace key to go back a page in Firefox
• All the applications open a lot quicker, even when I have 10 Firefox windows to load, it kicks Vista’s ass.
• It comes with more games than any version of Windows I’ve ever had.
• Did I mention it’s so much quicker than Vista

I’ve still got lots more to learn, but almost everything I’ve done so far has been pretty simple once it’s set up. On the other hand, things on Vista are pretty easy to set up but a pain because they never work properly.

Overall I’m pretty impressed, before I installed Ubuntu I may have had a total of 20 hours linux experience and maybe 20 years of Windows experience, so I can’t expect it to be as natural to me as the Microsoft solution.

I really haven’t found a reason to go back !

It was a little bit scary, but after a few Vista related problems in the last few days I’d had enough.

A while ago I figured out that most of the things I do online involve Firefox and with a bit of research it was easy to see that most of the other things could easily be adapted to Ubuntu.

Months ago I’d looked at doing a dual boot set up but due to all the crap that came with Vista I didn’t have enough space on my hard drive.

This afternoon I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and burnt it to a CD. One of the great things about Ubuntu is that you can run it from the CD. It ran as fast as Vista did so I thought once I had Ubuntu fully installed then it would be flying….. I wasn’t wrong.

So using Vista I spent 4 hours backing up 6GB of data to a portable drive then deleted Vista from my life forever. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to, My system didn’t come with restore disks, and I didn’t make any either.

Overall the experience has been pretty good. I’m making this post in Ubuntu without having to do anything special.

So far I’ve come across three minor problems.

1. My laptop screen brightness has dimmed and I can’t find anywhere to adjust it (there is a fix, need to look for it)
2. My wireless networking isn’t working (but I think I know how to fix it)
3. Adobe Air is only an alpha release so Tweetdeck might not be real stable (i’ll look for an alternative)

I’m sure I’ll get all these things sorted within the next few hours.

I’ll post some updates on how things are going.

Update: I just realised that Vista won’t be entirely out of my life until I convince my girlfriend she doesnt need to play World of Warcraft anymore