061203 22:32 by iDRMRSR

Rilly, Linux fans, I almost literally took a chill pill and came down from my high MS Horse. OK, so in this humble MS user's calm and considered opinion, yeah, a modern distribution of Linux is probably a decent replacement for a Windows business desktop box...maybe not XP Media Center, though.

It falls short in the graphics and sound categories. I see I'm not alone here, as Google searches reveal, either. Reasonably, that's because I'm trying to run Ubuntu on a "designed for Windows" box. If I were to swap out my video card and audio card for more well supported models, it'd probably work. Same thing for the webcam.

It falls short in the USENET category, too. There isn't ONE program that I can find which BOTH posts binaries AND unwinds multiple Yenc posts. Still, I could use KNODE to read the text stuff and the non multi part posts, and post binary attachments, and then switch to PAN to download multipart stuff. Which is similar to what I do on Windows, alternating from Outlook Express to Free Agent. Though, I COULD use Free Agent 100% of the time...except personally I hate the quirks in the user interface (scrolling with mouse wheel, won't display attachments like .jpgs INLINE). So I just use it to download LeMur.

I finally did soup up the disk access to something better, though I have no idea if it is OPTIMAL. I'm not going to crack open the HD enclosure and look at the chips inside. But I found a couple of tweaks (like UltraDMA mode 5) which put a charge in its shorts.

It excels in the desktop eye candy department, though. Even without Beryl, which I wish Windows had now that I've seen it. Still, you can't set screen resolution in KDE, so the fonts are always too small by comparison with Windoze, whereas GNOME is spot on all by itself, but duller than KDE in the eye candy department. And BERYL isn't helped by the particular video card that I have there (nVidia).

So then I had this great idea to try out WINE, to see if I could simply launch .EXE files off my Windows Fat32 partition!

I was going to spend an evening doing this when I discovered ... http://us.ubuntu.archive.com IS DOWN TONIGHT! Yup, that's the main UBUNTU software repository. For some reason, I can't reach that site all evening, so I couldn't even attempt to install WINE.

I'll have to make a note to myself to try this all out in another six months or so. It's such a shame, it ALMOST worked for me, but 95% of a pie isn't going to get me to cut away from Windows for daily use.

I'll prolly just fall back to plan A, which was to buy a new box next year with Vista pre-installed, a $400 box which will probably be four times as large as the last Dell I got in 2003. Aha, but then THAT Dell will be the OLD machine, and prolly more than suitable for ANOTHER try at Linux!

From my viewpoint, Bill Gates is sitting pretty with no worries from the Linux camp until he retires. Which won't be that much longer! And then I think they WILL be in trouble. It's ALMOST there, and I'm SO dyed in the wool M$ lover, it almost hurts to admit it.