The End of an Era
October 24th, 2008
I bought my first Apple hardware a number of years ago — a 400MHz titanium Powerbook. The thing came with Mac OS X preloaded, but it was so slow that it was unusable. I put Debian on it, and was mostly happy with it — until the titanium case started coming apart. Oh, and the small detail that the built-in wifi reception was so poor that I had to use a PCMCIA card to get a signal in some parts of my house.
But ever since then, we’ve always had some piece of Apple hardware in active use in our house.
About 7 years ago, my main workstation was a rapidly-aging 600MHz Alpha with — gasp — PCI video. It was OK for programming but really awfully slow at anything graphical. I was wanting to get into video editing, and we bought an 800 MHz iMac. The kind with the inverted-bowl base. A nice machine at the time. This was going to be my main workstation.
When it arrived at home, I unpacked it. Terah walked in and said, “Wow, my new computer is cute!” So it became *her* computer, and has been ever since.
It’s rather old and is showing its age. Its wifi card died a couple of years ago. The 800MHz CPU is slow with today’s websites.
So yesterday, we clicked on the apple and shutdown for the last time. It left her desk, replaced with a Linux desktop with a 20″ 1600×1200 LCD (replacing the 15″ 1024×768). I had assembled this Linux desktop out of spare parts in our basement, with a 4-year-old Athlon XP CPU. It’s still faster than her Core 2 Duo work laptop running Vista, but that’s another story.
I put Debian lenny on it. And I’ve got to say — wow — the utility of Debian as a desktop OS for the non-geeky has taken an incredible turn for the better in the last few years. Terah was fine with switching to Linux. I set it up for her — Firefox for web, Thunderbird for mail, J-Pilot for syncing to her Palm, OpenOffice, gajim, etc.
Her concerns were: having Thunderbird make a nice “whoosh” sound when it successfully finished transmitting an email, having desktop gadgets (I installed screenlets, which I think she likes a lot), and…. I don’t think I remember any others.
So now we both run Linux on our desktops.
Oh, and on her laptop, I poked around in the Vista control panels (I must have “authorized it to display this panel” a dozen times, stupid thing), and eventually found a box where I could optimize for visual effects or optimize for performance. I hit optimize for performance, and it transformed its interface into approximately Windows 2000 after a couple of seconds. I think that change made it a lot faster. It’s now about as fast as the 25%-as-fast Linux box. I guess that’s good for Vista.
Categories: Technology
My other concern was that I wanted it to generally be cute. After finding the right wallpaper, screen saver, and screenlets, it is!
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So, 2008 [b]is[/b] the year of the Linux desktop? :)
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m3 t00.
Except I have the complication of wanting to convert my existing desktop (XP, not Vista, because I’m not crazy). I visited the Debian website yesterday and was kind of disappointed not to find a nice Roadmap For Dumping Windows sort of page. I guess that’s an “if you have to ask, you’re not qualified to run Debian on the desktop” sort of thing.
But I’m thinking I’m gonna just get a second drive (we should have one around here), swap this one out, do the install, then when it’s all happy I’ll reinstall and mount the old one and bring over such data as I need. At this point, that *can’t* be more painful than fixing WGA and/or manually updating all the patches that won’t automatically update because of WGA.
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John Goerzen Reply:
October 25th, 2008 at 10:01 am
You might start here:
http://wiki.debian.org/FromWindowsToDebian
A search for “Windows” on that wiki might provide other useful tips. Though I suspect you probably already know a lot of what’s on that page.
That wiki page does link to the IBM Windows-to-Linux roadmap, which is:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-roadmap.html
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Thanks… but what I had in mind was “How to switch a Windows machine to Linux,” not “How to switch a Windows *user* to Linux.”
If I was (merely) a disgruntled Windows user, I’d be thinking to myself, “Self, you have to buy a new machine to run Linux. All I want is to fix the machine I *have*.”
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John Goerzen Reply:
October 25th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Ah… I probably don’t have great suggestions for you, but:
http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/i386/index.html.en
Debian’s installer can resize partitions, if that’s what you’re wanting to do. I’m pretty sure it supports NTFS, but if not, try out this bootable CD:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
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