TIME TO EXPERIMENT
12/28/07
I am using (or abusing, as my wife would put it) the holiday break this year to
start investigating Linux on my PC.  My ultimate goal is to be free
of the chains of Microsoft and shed their O/S before I feel compelled to
upgrade to Vista.  I bought Partition Magic and re-sized one
of my HD partitions so that I could add a Linux partition.  I then installed
Ubuntu 7.10 and started tinkering.  It's slow-going, but I am getting more
confident about making the leap.  I initially spent a couple frustrating hours
figuring out how to get Ubuntu to successfully wake up from standby mode
(it is a must for me to have standby mode be workable).
I needed to switch to a more
suitable video driver for my ATI All-in-Wonder 8500DV than Ubuntu
originally selected in the install process (it chose a generic
VESA driver).  Other things have gone
more smoothly.  Most of the games I have (Hoyle and other) play
perfectly in Wine (a Windows Emulator for Linux).  Wine emulation was
also improved when I switched to the more appropriate graphics driver.
Quicken 2007 does not work in Wine at this point, but <b>MoneyDance</b>
($30) looks like a very good alternative and did a good job
importing the .QIF file exported from Quicken.  Today I just got the forward
and back buttons on my <b>Microsoft Intellimouse</b>
to work (not at all obvious, but somebody had already
done all the legwork at <a href="/linkto.shtml?UbuntuForums.org">UbuntuForums.org</a>).
<br><br>
Linux has a ways to go to
catch the polish and robustness of Windows, but it's come a long way and I
like what I see.  For one thing, Ubuntu automatically mounted all
of my Windows NTFS volumes when it installed, so I can read and write to all of my Windows HD
partitions.  That makes file sharing a snap.  I didn't try installing Ubuntu
on an NTFS partition itself, though.  I wasn't that brave.  Linux also 
seemlessly intermixes 64-bit and 32-bit environments.  You truly get the best
of both worlds.  Wine is hit and
miss.  It runs a lot of Windows programs very well, but others (usually newer
stuff which presumably uses some newer API calls) flop.  I'm committed to it,
though.  I don't want to <a href="/linkto.shtml?www.geek.com/rave-two-months-with-ubuntu-linux-and-loving-it/">install VMWare</a>.  What's the point of switching to Linux
if I have to keep around a legitimate copy of Windows, after all?  My wife's
only comments so far have been "I'm not impressed!"