For years I’ve been using Linux on servers, but in the past few weeks I’ve found myself using it quite a bit more. If fact, this post comes to you from my newly Linux-loaded laptop.
The other night I decided that although Vista has it’s place, it wasn’t on my laptop. Thinking about it, I’m surprised I held out on Vista for a whole six months—it never did run very well. Anyway, Ubuntu 7.04 is my laptop’s OS now. I was quite impressed by the install process. If you’ve ever installed Ubuntu before, you know that it’s a live cd, meaning you don’t have to install the OS to start running it and using applications—just pop in the CD. This is neat, but the best part is that it really works and everything is fully supported. I popped in the CD, waited 30 seconds, it found my laptop’s WiFi hardware, configured the drivers, and asked me which network I wanted to connect to. This amazed me. Even on Windows XP and Vista I had to search for drivers on the internet with another computer, then transfer them via USB thumb drive, before manually installing them. Bravo Ubuntu! More progress like this and you will be [more] mainstream in no time.
Though not the primary operating system, Ubuntu 7.04 is now being virtualized on both my desktop and my work desktop (Mark (the boss) got was a little annoyed today when he couldn’t figure out how to get out of Linux mode) using VMware Server (newly free!). This works much better than I would have guessed. There’s a very slight delay between input and output, but it’s very usable and very convenient. The ability to boot Linux in a window within Windows eliminates all the short-comings of a dual-boot setup. At both work and home, I find myself using virtual Ubuntu almost as much as I do Windows. There just aren’t many things that can’t be done with Linux or can be done better by Windows.
The other place I use Linux is the most interesting to me, but I’ll understand if most readers don’t share this passion. I’ve started working on an embedded Linux system at Harbortronics for—you guessed it—time lapse. So far it’s a neat little package, and easier to work with than I expected. It’s basically just a circuit board based around a 180MHz computer-on-a-chip. It has USB, Ethernet, serial ports, a card reader: basically everything you need in a computer. It runs a form of Debian Linux (kernel 2.6). Currently, I have a web server, SSH server, LCD text output, and serial terminal running on it. I’m pretty optimistic about the future of this project, if I ever get some more development time. >
Bleh: conclusion. So yeah, Linux, try it: ubuntu.com. It’s easier than you think and, did I mention, free?