AyeTea

Home A Room Without Windows Guinea Pig #3 Takes the Plunge.

Guinea Pig #3 Takes the Plunge.

Tuesday, 02 June 2009 20:47 Daniel Cumming

User Rating: / 5
PoorBest 

 

Things didn't get off to a great start, however it was not any fault of Linux. For some reason the flash drive I was using wasn't getting recognised, or at least the content of it was not. Booting from it led to the computer telling me the operating system was missing. However, from a different flash drive everything went as per the instructions. I had a play about running the OS off the drive to get a brief feel for the thing. I liked the effort put into the NBR alternative desktop format. What was even better though, I must say, was having the option not to use it. I really didn't feel the need for it on 10 inch screen, and I felt much more at home in a more traditional WIMP environment.

The installation was rather rapid. It was pleasing to know that (unlike in a Windows installation) my system was not getting filled up with features and tweaks that I'd probably not use. After picking my language, location and keyboard format I got the option to install over my whole hard disk, or to add another partition to install too. Very, very nifty. I could be dual booting if I wished, without having to do anything more complicated than slide a bar from left to right, selecting how much drive space to assign.


First impressions.

I don't like 70s brown colour schemes. Thankfully, this was easily sorted. After that instant aversion was overcome I got busy making myself at home. I'd normally use quite a bit of open source software on a Windows system, so Open Office and Firefox were familiar companions from the off. Evolution mail client didn't really settle with me quickly, so I decided to ditch it in favour of Thunderbird. A journey over to the add/remove programmes option on the application menu unearthed a revelation for me. Unlike in Windows, where the 'add/remove' moniker should be called 'remove/reinstall/remove and leave junk behind on your system', I was presented with option of installing software, right off the net, with me not having to do anything more than scroll through the long lists of options. I felt like a kid in a toy store. I resisted the temptation to try to install everything in the whole world twice and all at once, plumping for Thunderbird. I watched a speedy and stress free installation.

After a setting up my accounts on Thunderbird and adding a few addons to Firefox (most helpful was Fission which put the page load indicator in the address bar, allowing me to turn off the status bar, hence saving screen space) I was feeling rather at home. Putting the 'visual effects' setting to 'extra' made me feel like my old XP installation was dowdy and boring whilst making Vista seem humourless and glamour-model plastic. Font sizes were shrunk. A nice desktop image was added. Panels were tweaked. A third desktop was added. Today it looks like this.

So far, so good! (screengrab resized with GIMP!)

Still to come.

On the audio front, I have an audio drama recording session coming up soon. I'll be taking my Ubuntu NBR system along to take an extra line out off the mixer desk. This will be the first test for Linux and audio. A simple experiment to see if some voice acting, straight off the mic can be easily cut, arranged, compressed, and EQ'd to the required standard. This is a bit of a wussy first test, but it will serve for a gradual learning curve for myself. Adapting to a new DAW can be a bit daunting at first until you get properly stuck in.

Daniel.