So far so good. This is basically the half way point of this short-holiday week and since work is crazy busy I haven’t been able to post about how it goes.
My test system is as follows:
AMD 3200XP
768MB DDR1 Memory
So, it’s been around 8 years since I’ve actually used an OS other than Windows for anything more than a server. Yet here I am, typing this on a freshly installed Ubuntu 7.04 system. I’ve been sitting here playing with it off and on all Sunday afternoon and have come to the conclusion that I need to give Linux another try as a desktop/workstation OS that just works. I really hope this works out, I truely do.
Most times during the work day, I despise having to use Windows for most of my work tasks since I’m 99% of the time working on a UNIX box remotely. Wether it’s a company box in Dallas, Frankfurt or China I’ve been using putty to remote in to do all work on the servers. Not that using a terminal SSH session will be a different feel from putty, but the environment around that session definitely will.
So here we go, a week of nothing but Ubuntu for all things work related, starting Tuesday technically but I have a feeling I will be extending this experiment to any time I touch a computer, outside of video games.
I feel like I’ve done something incredibly stupid now, yesterday I decided ‘hey lets switch the fileserver to CentOS’ . The reasons I decided to switch away from BSD on my fileserver was so I could be on the same platform as work and I actually like this OS for a server. I made the call the other day to eventually have all servers for work (currently around 25worldwide) switched over to CentOS from Fedora Core and RedHat 9. CentOS is just RHEL (Redhat Enterprise Linux) stripped of all mention of Redhat and all other trademark content removed. I gotta say, this is what I remember linux being like. Stupid me though decides to change the OS on a 1.5TB fileserver over without actually making sure Linux can read AND write to a UFS2 filesystem…. definitely my bad. I stupidly thought linux would support reading and writing to that filesystem so I could leave the RAID array alone. Oh well, another 3 hours till a 600GB data transfer is done and I can get cracking on the reinstall.
I played around with DesktopBSD and PC-BSD for a while and found that I hated PC-BSD. I truely do not like it’s custom package system as it destroys the beauty that is *BSD, ports+packages.
DesktopBSD impressed me more, even if it’s a bit behind in the times I found the OS completely usable and updatable from the GUI interface. In fact, I decided to run a test with it and installed it on a File server, Tera, I was putting together. I was going to go with my trusty FreeBSD install or possibly a Fedora Core 6 install (since I work with FC a lot for work) but decided to try something different. My thinking here was “could this OS be useful in the SOHO/small business environment” and so far after 2 months of running it this way I’d have to say yes. I’ve tried to use the GUI to do most software updating or installing, rather then the usual command line and haven’t run into any major road blocks. I need to do more SAMBA configuring via the GUI though to see if this could really be used in SOHO environment for non-uber geeks