April 17, 2008 Archives

I've just discovered a rather awesome Battlestar Galactica podcast; the Galactica Watercooler. The podcast has a definite talk-radio feel and includes phone-ins.

I installed Ubuntu on my laptop about a month or so ago and have been dual booting it with XP ever since to see how things worked out. After a month of using Ubuntu I haven't once had to drop into XP on the laptop and am considering the test successful. There's been nothing I've wanted to do on the laptop that I haven't been able to do in Ubuntu and the next step is to upgrade to Hardy Heron, the next version of Ubuntu, when it's released in a couple of weeks.

However, having said all that, I'm still not going to install it on my main PC; for a number of reasons:

• I still have a lot of Windows based applications and games and really don't want to have to mess about with Wine or other software to get them running under Linux.


• If somebody phones, emails or IMs me looking for some PC advice it makes life much easier having XP in front of me so that I can walk them through the problem.


• The desktop is left switched on virtually constantly; it's only ever switched off if there's a need to reboot, so dual booting would be a waste of hard drive space.


• And, the main reason I'm not installing it on my desktop is that I like the way my PC is currently set up and am very comfortable with it. Even with having to reinstall XP once or twice in the last 3 or 4 years I've still ended up using the same sort of settings and the same little utilities I've always used.

However, I can happily say that if you don't like or just don't want to use XP or Vista I can recommend Ubuntu as a very good alternative. Just be aware that although support for Ubuntu is very good, it's nowhere near as widespread or accessible as it is for the Windows platforms, and gaming suffers similarly. There is a vibrant community out there and members are more than happy to help others out.

In summary, Ubuntu is brilliant and I've no intentions of removing it from the laptop. I might even go the whole hog yet and remove XP from it totally. But, I like XP on my desktop and am not going to give it up.