I did it.

After over 10 years of playing with Linux but never feeling that it quite had the maturity, I’ve made the switch on my main PC. Why didn’t I move before? Because in the past I would spend 5 times as long configuring my system to print, or for USB, or for Office apps, or for… well you get the idea..

As much as I love playing with PCs, when it comes to my ‘main’ OS I really want things to just work. No messing. I want tinker under my own terms, not because I have to. There’s also the subject of applications and games that don’t run on Linux, and the fact that my family still want to use Windows. In any event I will have to dual boot for their sake.
But! I made the decision after looking at the current distros; seeing how clean and easy they were to configure and control, and so, with my new 500GB hard drive installed, the move began..

First decision, which Linux distro? I decided on on Ubuntu 7.04, very popular and it default to the Gnome desktop (I’ve never really liked KDE).

My PC has 3 physical drives:
120GB (NTFS C:)
80GB (spare)
500GB (NTFS F:)
I’m not going to go into great detail on the install, as it went like a dream. I installed Linux on my 70GB drive, using 2GB for swap, and the rest for the / partition (I really couldn’t be arsed with slicing it up, and I intend to store all my data on the 500GB drive anyway. LILO handles the dualboot with Windows fine.
After the install I followed the excellent guide on configuring the perfect desktop on www.howtoforge.com (which, I should add, needs to be in your list of favourites if you use Linux!). Thanks to Falko Timme for your guidance! This install also includes the NTFS configuration tools and I can read/write see my NTFS drives
Once I had everything working (and yes, it all does!) I then decided to make my desktop 3D by installing Beryl and and configuring it to use my Nvida 6600 GT gfx card. After enabling the Desktop Effects and downloading the nvidia driver, I used the excellent Synaptic Package Manager to install Beryl, and suddenly my desktop looked really cool, complete with a 3D cube that I can use to rotate to my 4 workspaces!

3D Desktop
Next I migrated all my Thunderbird emails, literally just a case of copying the profiles folder to the correct folder in Linux and updating the profiles.ini file. Firefox bookmarks were equally simple.

To overcome the problems with Windows programs, I again referred to howtoforge.com and used vmware server and convertion program to give me an image of my existing Windows system to run inside Linux! Works like a dream.

There is only one snag. There is a bug in the Nvidia drivers which causes a black windows in Beryl when it runs about of graphics memory. I’m still looking around for a fix for this, but it’s not a big deal.

So…I’m done! My desktop is officially Linux. Bye bye Microsoft (or at least as much as I can get rid of!)

There’s more to do, but at the moment it’s looking good! And the 3D desktop is sooo damned cool, even my non-geeky friends are impressed! :D