It's the dawn of a new era. Or at least, the month or two trial period while I decide if I want the new era. See, I made a big switch two days ago. I'm running Ubuntu (Linux) on my laptop.
Three nights ago, a sector went bad on my hard drive. And the luck of the summer being what it is... It was a damn important sector. The poor laptop couldn't even boot fully.
It took some time to diagnose. (Honestly, what does "hard error D0000144" mean to you? Here's a hint for you computer help forum guys... not every problem is adware, virus or spyware.) And more time to run a few disk repairs and get it bootable again. But it wasn't usable, things were goofy, it wasn't stable and it was going to need a good reformatting kick in the ass.
I've been waiting for an excuse to try out linux, more specifically Ubuntu. I can see the writing on the wall, Vista is a big bag of suck. (In the sense of DRM and 'premium content' [aka High Definition] restrictions and control.) My control over my computer will be severely limited if I keep marching down the Windows road. I don't see things as being much better over in Mac land, especially when money is factored in.
If I'm going to have to spend a bunch of time reformatting, and rebuilding my laptop... why not go ahead and try something new? I like the idea of free, community supported, open source software. I'm not talking about being cheap. (Though that's a nice touch.) I'm talking about the kind of freedom, choice and ownership that you can't get from a company which shows a strong interest in locking me into their software/hardware and restricting my ability to use things things which I own (hardware, media, ideas, etc.). I'm looking at you Apple. And you Microsoft.
We're talking about a lifestyle change here people.
So I tried the live CDs of Ubuntu and it's cousin Kubuntu. They're same but different.) Made the decision to go with Ubuntu and started the installation. The basics have been silky smooth. Overall everything works well. I've got OpenOffice, Firefox, Gaim & Evolution. So the basics are covered.
It's the not so basic stuff that's been giving me headaches.
- Here at the house we use an SC101 from Netgear for networked backup. It's basically a networked harddrive. However, there is no Linux support for this product. So I've had to do a large amount of gyration to get connected to it via a share from my Windows Media Center (MCE). (Figuring out that I needed samba set up and resolving a master browser conflict on my network were the big issues.) That took up most of yesterday.
- Getting my Outlook 2k3 email converted and imported was also a PITA. I had all my data backed up, but Evolution doesn't import directly from pst. So I had to upgrade my Outlook on my MCE, so it could open the pst formatted files. Then install Mozilla's Thunderbird on the MCE machine to convert all the email folders to mbox. (It would only convert active pst) Copy all those files to my laptop and import each folder individually. That is a process in progress.
- I'm also worried about editing my photographs. I use a Canon RebelXT which has a RAW format of CR2. (RAW is like a digital negative, you have more control over image processing if you use it.) I haven't had the chance to start using GIMP or any other photo editing/converting software. But I've not seen much encouraging information. This process is soon to be in progress.
- I used to sync my phone and calendar via bluetooth. But I haven't really even started looking into getting that working.
- I have a GPS unit that was originally used with the Palm III, which I hacked apart and converted to a serial connection. I'll need to look into getting software to run that, and then maps to navigate with. A headache to look forward to.
Other than those headaches (future and current) I'm pretty pleased so far. Adding software has been a snap, and aside from my own goofy needs/requirements (to steal a phrase from the Mac people) 'everything just works'...
Anyway, I've got a paper due today...
Labels: error, hard drive, import, linux, reformat, ubuntu, upgrade
