Well, it's been interesting getting things working. Right now, I have Fedora 9 installed in a dual boot environment on my main Asus F8SA notebook and Ubuntu 8.04 on this old Dell C600 notebook. I must also mention that I am using a Verizon Broadband PC5750 card to access the internet. Yup, there's ways to get virtually everything working in Linux. Hardware is hardly an issue nowaday, unless you have some weird proprietary piece of hardware that no one else even uses. Frankly, I was surprised that the Linux community had gotten these Broadband Cards (PCMCIA, USB, Express) to even work but I'm doing it right now. Fedora on the Asus is running swimmingly, Bluetooth pretty much worked out of the box as well as wireless. Not so on my Dell running Ubuntu, but I think that has something to do with my wireless card (PCMCIA) and not having the drivers yet.
But there are some downsides so far, if you can call it that.
1) You NEED the Internet
2) You NEED to know HOW to search for answers.
3) You NEED patience to get things set up.
It will be interesting to see how much tweeking will be needed once everything is set up and working. But regardless, installing programs and such can be easy and hard at the same time. Most distributions include a sudo Add/Remove programs that let's you search their (meaning the distributions {Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc}) compatible program database. The downside to this is that new versions of programs don't automatically show up on these lists. For most things I don't see much a problem, but I have already run into an issue where I wanted the latest release, in this case the program Wine, and I couldn't get it via the Add/Remove Programs(Packages) system. Here's where the INTERNET and KNOWING HOW TO SEARCH comes into play. In a few minutes, I found answers on how to install the latest version of the programs directly from the source.
So far, I am liking what I am seeing coming out of the Linux scene. It's come a long way and it is solid. Would I recommend it to a client? Right now, no way. But I think after setting up these systems and seeing how much tweeking or troubleshooting is needed after the fact I might be persuaded to change my mind. So far my experience has been pretty positive. I'll keep you posted.
Alex
2 Comments:
Maybe I am missing something, but wouldn't you need the net to update any windows environment? Sure, I guess if you buy tons of software, then you can install from a disk, but then what about updates? Obviously those would be found via the web.
Thoughts? I think pretty much nowadays, the net is a must if you want any kind of flexibility/customization in your computing environment.
So far, things seem good.
Yeah, but it's more necessary with Linux than with Windows. I ran into a few problems after the initial install that were resolved after looking for answers via a internet search. With windows you can pretty much install and then install the drivers from a disc and 95% of the time you are go to go even without updates. The fault really doesn't lay with Linux as much as it does with hardware vendors. And you're right, you update on both systems, but unless you have a Linux expert on hand you will eventually need the internet to find answers to problems.
Obviously this isn't a big deal, as most people do have internet, and like I said, the proof in the pudding will be after I have it all setup and if anything else goes wrong. But with Linux, it isn't as easy as installing the drivers to get hardware going as it is with windows. Even a person computer illiterate as Travis could install a Video Card in a windows environment, but I can guarantee that I wouldn't do tech support over he phone for him if he needed to do the same thing in a Linux environment. I'd have to be there in person, and probably get on the net to get specific instructions on how to do it... unless I was proficient enough to do it live... which I confess I am no where near.
But like I said, I'm pretty pleased for now.
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