All these great new distributed networking ideas keep coming to mind, but most of them get dismissed with the ‘I can’t afford it’ trump. Being a student certainly has it’s advantages, but when it comes to satisfying my interest in expanding my home network, it’s not much fun not having any cash flow.
I’ve recently gotten the itch to build my own PC, as unsatisfied with my desktop as I was. It was a rush purchase years ago just after moving to the UK, changing jobs, & losing access to a company laptop. It was fine for remote-desktop working from home, but everything was painfully slow, thanks to it’s entry-level Vista setup.
After seeing how great Xubuntu performs on the lightweight server I recently set up, I decided to wipe Vista from my PC altogether & try out the newly released Ubuntu beta, Jaunty Jackalope. Imagine my surprise when I looked more closely at the PC that had been slogging along for the last 2 years and noticed that it has an AMD Core 2 Duo 64 processor. The reason I was so surprised is because it never felt like a dual-core processor. In fact, it was noticeably slower than the 7-year-old Dell laptop I still have running XP.
I merrily burned the 64-bit version of Jaunty onto a CD and set to work on installation. After the several-hour-long process I had experienced with my Intrepid install last week (due to the low-spec nature of my lightweight server), I was pleasantly surprised to see the entire process finished in around 20 minutes. But what really knocked my socks off was the boot time. It took 24 seconds to show me a login prompt, and another 12 until I had a full desktop. WOW!
But that’s not all. Everything on my PC is now smoking fast. File system navigation, network access, you name it. Installing new software couldn’t be easier, and setting up automatic file sharing around my network took all of 10 minutes, thanks to sshfs & autofs (helpful instructions here & here).
All this with nothing more than an OS change? I’m still astounded that I’ve managed to upgrade my PC without so much as spending a dime. No extra memory, no processor replacement, absolutely nothing. I didn’t so much as leave the house. This is a sure sign that the times are changing, that ubuntu is not only a serious competitor to Windows, but a superior one. Unless things go horribly wrong, I think I’m converted to open-source for life. You’ve convinced me.
Installing Linux is an eye-opener isn’t it. Shows how OS’s like Vista place such a huge load on hardware, and for what..!? It’s as if MS are in league with the hardware manufacturers to perpetuate the PC upgrade path. What a load of balls. Linux to the rescue!
Glad to see you’re getting into OSS. My new employer lives and breathes by open source software and I’m relishing the opportunity to use all the “right stuff”. God, Lehman was awful, wasn’t it!!
Also, if you enable all the eye candy it looks even more impressive than anything Microsoft has produced imo. Desktop animations, reflections, virtual desktop cubes etc.
Use Virtualbox and you can also have a seamless XP virtual machine running as a second desktop screen under Ubuntu to run anything that requires Windows (Apart from anything too graphically intensive)
I think the only downside is still based around gaming. It’s the only reason I couldn’t go full time Linux as it’s just not got the support at the moment.
Yes! I can’t comprehend what Vista was doing with all my resources, because I never saw any benefits. What a waste of CPU cycles!
The logic of open-source just makes so much more sense. With such a broad developer base, more bright ideas are suggested & implemented. The driving force behind proprietary software wastes too many development & management resources on protecting its code base. So much more can be accomplished when the focus is on compatibility, modularity, and forward growth.
Years ago, when I first started studying Computer Science, I remember thinking that open-source was more of a fun thing to do in your spare time – a geeky alternative, but one that would remain so – how wrong I was!
Banks have always been hesitant to make the switchover, the risks are too high – if it’s more expensive, it must be better, right? We were desperately missing all our SLAs in GFS until Raashid migrated our system to Linux. It was a revolution – we were the first Tier I application to move into a production Linux environment. It was a huge success, with good reason – we cut down our daily number crunching by 6-8 hours. Too bad none of that matters anymore …
And re: gaming – who needs PC gaming when you have a PS3???