I’m stoked. I’ve redone the little area of my home that I work from and it a) works well so far and b) looks super-freaking sweet.
I moved a desktop that’s sole purpose was development for one client out of here because they haven’t asked me to do anything in 2 months. So, off to a random bedroom with that. I also picked up a 19″ LCD from work. We had a guy resign and I was next in line for a new monitor. Since I already used my own personal 17″ LCD as a 2nd monitor on my laptop I decided to haul a slightly used AMD Athlon 3000 based media-center-ish PC out of a closet and fired that baby up.
New monitor on the old laptop, old monitor onto the new machine.
I’ll be finishing the Windows 2003 Server/SQL Server 2005/PerformancePoint 2007 install once I get the proper CD keys, but I’ve also put on a small Ubuntu Desktop 8 installation. It’s been about 3 years since I sat down and actually fiddled with a Linux based desktop machine. For years it was my primary computing environment at home but that all went away when I moved to OS X.
And ya know what? Things are improving. I like that. Oh, I was skeptical at first.
See, I clicked the wrong download link the first time around so I got the ISO for 64 bit Ubuntu Server instead of the Desktop version. I installed it while I waited for the 64 bit desktop version to download just for fun. I then installed the desktop version. No problems there,and in both cases the installer figured out how to correctly install GRUB and permit the existing Win2k3 system. Nice! Progress.
Then I tried to get the network working. Since I didn’t have an IP after the first boot obviously this thing didn’t support my wireless USB adapter. I’ve run Linux for years. That used to happen to me a lot, so I hit the interwebs and fought with it. I saw that it should work, but mine didn’t. I thought maybe it was just broken in the 64 bit version so I went and installed th 32 bit version Saturday morning. Still broken. Hours later I figure I’ll try and bridge the wireless connection from my laptop to the media-center-ish PC and see if I can download a kernel, patch it, and finally get this thing working. While doing that I noticed something in the upper right corner of the Ubuntu desktop.
It was the little applet that lets you select which network card you want to use.
I click it, select my wireless network and it’s working. I’m such an idiot sometimes. Okay, reinstall the 64 bit version of the system and it still works. Wonderful!
After that it was smooth sailing. Fix a few UI things that I’m partial to, grab a few packages from the Ubuntu servers and I’ve got a fully functional desktop at this point.
