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After my last post, regular readers will have waiting patiently to read about my slick new Linux system! Sorry to disappoint, but it was a disaster from start to finish!
As a pre-requisite to installing Linux, I needed a free distribution, as we was unwilling to spend even more money chasing a stable, usable computer. Bear in mind that I work as an IT professional, so I’m very familiar with the different distributions and the widespread acceptance. I wanted something that still allowed me to edit photographs, create and edit audio files, and to create and edit videos. With all this in mind, Ubuntustudio seemed like the ideal choice!
I’ve written recently about my upgrade to Vista, and i have to say, I’m disappointed. To be honest, I should have expected it given the exposure in the media and the professional press, but I always felt that it was maybe all too critical. Well, I can tell you that from my own experience, Vista is a frustrating OS to have as your main system!
One of the reasons I went to Vista was that I liked the look and feel - it’s a clear improvement over XP - but I get the impression that all this visual wizadry is at the expense of system performance. I have a 512Mb graphics card and 4Gb of main RAM, but my system is at best sluggish! 
This presents me with a dilema:
- Either I revert back to XP and stick with an unsatisfactory Microsoft environment, but which gives me the same, fully compatible office suite as I use at work, as well as my preferred development environment - Visual Studio;
- or I make the move to Linux as my main OS, but sacrifice my office suite (OpenOffice is great, but not 100% compatible - particularly when using graphics) and my development environment!
I’ve been looking more into Linux recently, and found that the UI is way better than Vista, so from this angle, the move would be beneficial, however, I can’t go for looks alone!
So my call goes out to you - my loyal readers. What would you do? How can I overcome my own objections and be free to move to Linux? How can I have my cake and eat it???!?
I look forward to your comments…. 
I was asked today by a recruiter which versions of UNIX I was familiar with, and this got me thinking. It seems that through my whole IT career, I’ve never worked on a mainstream release of UNIX - only derivatives!
It started at college with MINIX - a scaled down version that was released in the public domain with full source code available in the textbook that we used (I think it was called ‘Operating Systems and Data Structures’ or something equally inspiring…!). I remember taking a copy of the disks home to my Atari ST and booting MINIX, then thinking “Cool! Now what???” 
Next, I started working for a company that used computers manufactured by Tadpole. These used a customised UNIX based on System V called TPIX. We also ran systems from DEC, which ran their own variation called ULTRIX (for which I’m a certified sysadmin!!!)
From here, I moved to a compnay that had another DEC system, but this time from one of their subsidiaries, which again ran a variant of UNIX with a whole layer of utilities which the manuals marked as “unstable”!
Since then, whilst I’ve had to use the occasional UNIX system (such as HPUX or Solaris) my main UNIX-like experience has been on LINUX. Once again though, when I chose to buy a copy for home use, for some reason I chose SuSE, rather than the more common Red-Hat.
So there we have it - my UNIX exposure in a nutshell - and not a mainstream flavor amongst the lot! 
In response to my previous article “Open Source Living”, I was asked to elaborate on what exactly ‘Open Source’ really is. It’s easy for those of us involved in the software industry to expect everyone to understand the terms that we use on a daily basis and sometimes, it’s great to have someone stop us and say “explain this to me”.
This is my attempt at clarifying exactly what Open Source really is!
A small, tucked away news item from IDG caught my eye this morning. It was one of those “On this day…” lists that most people ignore, but the word Linux seemed to jump out at me. It turns out that the first version of the Linux kernel (0.02) was released to the public on this day in 1991!
I did some research, as this had piqued my curiosity….
http://www.linux.org had nothing specific on this - even in their section on the “Timeline” of the Linux OS. Even Wikipedia - usually a great source of information for me - was unable to help!
I eventually uncovered a post in another blog that talks about the release in some detail. You can read that at http://kerneltrap.org/node/14037.
