The Malgorian Blog

I've talked about making the switch to Linux off and on for years now.

At present I'm mostly there. I installed Ubuntu on my old comp and have it set up next to the Windows box. Many things work fine on it, although I did notice that minecraft still does weird crashes on the old comp regardless of OS. I suspect it's the driver issue after all... As such I haven't minecrafted much this week since I've had the Linux box running the entire time. Trying to get use to it and all that. There's some things I like, some things I don't. I may yet attempt other distributions to see if they're suitable for me.

To run the Windows box, I just have to swap a few cords, but there's only a few things I can't use on linux right now (Games aside from Steam - although I have Steam itself on Linux) so the needs to switch over to the other computer which has noisier fans is likely to be limited to minecrafting and games. Although only a small number of my steam games would work on that one as well. >_>

technically if I want to turn the linux comp back into a windows comp all I have to do is swap out the harddrive. I still have the harddrive XP is installed on tucked away. ^^ Doing this I might swap out the other comp's XP drive for a fresh one and go about playing with new installs. It'll just depend on what kind of harddrive that comp takes. If it needs sata drives, no problem - they're easy to get. If it takes IDE... well, that would be a bit harder to locate these days it seems. ^^ Although I do technically have a useable IDE drive - I'd just have to finish backing it's contents up elsewhere before formatting it for an OS.

Since Zonealarm seems to have gotten borked today and refuses to start, I'm just saying to hell with it all and going to move to linux. Not like there's a DRASTIC need for me to be using windows when the vast majority of the programs I frequently use tend to be ported from linux anyway!

I tried Ubuntu a few times and each time it failed to load for me. I just finished testing out the live CD for Slax 6.1.1 and it seemed to work flawlessly. (It seemed to pause at one point looking for a udevadm trigger, but hitting enter made it continue on.)

I'll be loading from the Live CD a few more times before installing it to the harddrive, mostly to test out internet connectivity (Which I couldn't do the first time since I forgot what server I connect to! oops. ^_^ In my defense, after setting it up on windows back in 2005, I never looked at it again and just hit "connect".)

Prior to that, I'm going to look over all the programs I typically use and make sure I have an idea of what to download. Also going to move my bookmarks file over to the external drive so I have a copy of it when I re-install firefox etc.

I may wait until these latest firefox exploits are fixed up first. >_>

Probably the biggest thing I lose will be Zmud, but I guess when I think about it I only used a couple of aliases on that for spellups and speedwalks. speedwalks are automated in the game nowadays (if not the most efficient) and I just recently tiered so I have almost no spellups to talk about! Once I'm settled away in linux I'll look into getting the aardwolf mush client working there. It's windows-only technically, but it's been verified to work under WINE.

Beyond that, what do I use the comp for? Well... not much I guess. Program, mud, watch videos and listen to music... etc. Most if not all of these things are doable in linux. I don't play any commercial windows-only PC games anymore. Last one I bought and played was CivII Gold. (Which I must confess I enjoyed even if I sucked at it most of the time.)

I'll have to check and see how flash works. I do regularly watch Foamy and Homestar Runner, both of which are flash driven. >_>


Oh, before anyone recommends Ubuntu to me, I already tried to use it's livecd and it failed to load to the desktop. I don't know why. Probably similar issue with what made Slax pause, although it didn't give me an understandable error msg. Slax probably had an alternative default in case such things failed. I honestly don't know.

The end result however will be this. Assuming the transition goes smoothly, I'll be Slax only on Freya (this comp) fairly soon. I have a few things I want to purchase between now and october, but after that I will be saving up for a new comp. I'll be buying the parts for that comp and may have Ubuntu installed on that. (I'll be trying to buy hardware compatible with it.)

Once that's done, Freya will be wiped out again and restored to Windows from it's recovery disc, and patched if microsoft is still patching XP by then. Then Freya will be offline until the end of time - and become my dedicated windows machine, mostly for games.

This is just a rough plan of course. We'll see how it goes.