Finally made the switch (partially) to Linux

[Jason]

For those of you who've been here awhile, I've been threatening to switch to Linux for years now.  I have one box I run here but rarely turn it on.  Anyway, I finally got mad enough at the slowness of my laptop to kill it and migrate to Linux over the weekend.

I ran into an issue which I sorted today and so far so good.

I'll still keep XP (not vista!) for my primary/work pc but for traveling and such, I'll see how I like Fedora core 9. 

Here's to a bright future of open source freedom 

[Mark]

Let me know how FC turns out for you, I'm running Ubuntu 8 on my laptop myself (dual boot) and I love it. If it weren't for my extremely expensive purchase of Adobe CS3 for Windows I would have gone all Linux on my laptop long ago. I know there are programs that are like the Adobe products, but again, it was a lot of money to spend to not use considering I use my laptop for most of my design work.

[Jason]

It doesn't look like wine has scored that app as portable on their platform.  Maybe there are some other emulator options. 

That's part of the reason it will be rough to switch my main pc because of all the software I've bought over the years.

[Mark]

Well, I guess there is always VMware Workstation (much like VMware Fusion for the Mac) which allows you to run Windows inside Linux but it's expensive as hell at $189.

[Mark]

Oooh, I just discovered VirtualBox today which is free, and it will let me run Windows in Linux so I can use CS3, I just might have to make the switch!!!

I'm currently running the Windows version at work with Ubuntu so I can test the website design and it's seems to be pretty dang stable.

http://www.virtualbox.org/

[Jason]

bookmarked! 

[Mark]

Jason, I forgot to mention, if you use this program you will want to pay special attention to section 4 of the user manual called "The VirtualBox Guest Additions". It has you install a package in your guest OS that allows it to support your hardware such as high end video cards and such. Otherwise without it, VirtualBox just passes generic hardware to the guest OS, for example before I did this I could only run 800x600 on my Linux guest, but now I can choose my actual monitor resolution.

Oh, and finally, if you don't plan on running your guest OS in full screen (when in full screen all your monitors resolution settings are available after you install Guest Additions mentioned above), you may want read this post:

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=26015#26015

I had to run the command in Windows so that I can set the windowed resolution of Ubuntu to 1280x800 because for whatever reason when not in full screen mode it reverts back to lower resolutions as the max.

This is true for Linux as a guest that is, I haven't tried running Windows as a guest in Linux yet.

[weekend camper]

I am also a Linux user, but have gone off the 24/7 useage after the distro (Ubuntu) couldn't get a dual monitor going correctly. 

I'll try again with Ubuntu 8.x.


Welcome to the club Jason!