The Path to Zen

My Ubuntu Experience: Pilot

I have decided to gradually migrate my main work environment to Linux, and only keep Windows for gaming and other MS proprietary things. It’s something I have been wanting to do for the past decade, I would give it a try about every two years and see that Linux wasn’t “quite there yet”, and give up. The dedicated server I rent for digiZen (i.e. the one serving you all this babbling of mine right now) has been running Fedora Core for over a year. I’ve been happy both using and maintaining it. On the other hand, none of the Linux distros (including a home-made one starting with me building from the kernel source) had been satisfactory and up to par as a day-to-day desktop environment.

Well, about a couple months ago, the “Genuine Windows” update notification popup finally got on my nerve, to the point of “ok, it’s that time again.” After playing around a Ubuntu installed in VMWare, I got confident enough to take it one step further into the typical dual-boot setup. A couple of nights later, I am happy to report that I’m working in an environment capable of supporting about 90% of my daily tasks. And I’m pretty confident that, with more googling and tweaking, and the great wine as the last resort, I’ll be pushing that number to very close to 100%.

That’s not to say, everything went as smooth as I would have liked it. I’m starting this series to keep some notes on the pitfalls and (usually unpleasant) surprises.

Next: Installation