Okay, it’s time for Martin’s annual trip to Linuxland. Last year it was Mandrake 8.0, and the two times before that was SuSE 7.x. This time round it’s going to be SuSE 8.1, which is due to be released in early October.
Mandrake was okay, but it somehow felt a little bit like Linux Jr. SuSE was more difficult to set up (although this may have been because I was less experienced with Linux at the time), but it felt more solid somehow. It’s most recent version (also 8.0) has had some pretty glowing reviews that give me confidence it has only become more powerful and easier to use in the time since I last installed it.
The SuSE 8.1 press release touts cool stuff such as KDE3, OpenOffice, and even GPhoto 2.1, which means that it should be able to talk to our digital camera. (I tried GPhoto under Mandrake, but couldn’t get it to work). K3b for “simple, reliable and rapid CD burning”. KMail for mail. Mozilla is production code now, and Opera 6 is available for Linux, too. And apparently TrueType fonts are a lot easier to get up and running now with XFree86 up to version 4.x.
All round, it seems like something I can make work. I’ll need to get used to working with the Gimp instead of Photoshop and PSP, and I’ll have to figure out what to do with Ogg Vorbis
Stuff I won’t be able to use… Visual Studio, and VS.NET. Not necessarily a bad thing, though. It may give me an incentive to get better at perl, or to learn Java. If it turns out I need to use VS at home, I can always try to convince work to give me a laptop, or I can run them under VMWare.
Also, my minidisc player is not going to be happy being hooked up to Linux life support. Again, this may have to be a VMWare job. And games, of course. But now that I’ve got a PS2 (and an N64: it’s-a me, Mario!), I spend much less time on PC games anyway.
If it all goes well, and I don’t go running back to hide behind billg’s skirts, I’ll be running Linux and Windows side by side for the first few months at least. I’ll have them on different hard drives, because I don’t really trust either of them not to eat the other’s partitions on a dual-boot system. (Past experience speaking, there.) Chances are I’ll probably keep the Windows disk around even after that. VMWare only goes so far, and I don’t think I’ll be able to give up PC games entirely.
So: tasks for the next few weeks until SuSE 8.1 arrives:
- Buy a new hard drive on Ebay. I’ve got a nice chunky 40Gb job for my data already, so a 10Gb drive will do just fine for holding my system partitions.
- Tidy up my hard drive. Move all actual data onto the data drive.
- Make about a zillion backup CDs
Fingers crossed that by this time next year, you won’t be reading about another annual experiment with Linux. I’m tired of Microsoft, and I hope that this time “Bye-bye” is going to be for real. (At home at least. Work is still a Microsoft Gold E-Commerce Partner. Ka-ching!)