I picked up me new machine last Friday and subsequently spent the weekend tinkering. Most of the tinkering was spent trying to get my monitors configured correctly and I wasted a ton of time there. With some sound advice, which I’ll post at some point, I’ve finally solved that particular issue tonight.

So I’m now running up on Fedora Core 6 using dual monitors with a spanning desktop. I still need to develop in .NET so I’m using VMWare for my virtualized windows development environment which is just damn cool. A fully networked virtual environment.

There are a few pleasant surprises since I was last in linux:

• Installs and updates have gotten a lot more painless with yum.
• Digital camera support. I plugged my camera into a usb drive and quickly imported my photos into f–spot. While I’m sure there are similar apps out there in the windows-land(picassa?), I personally have never had a slick way of categorizing, storing, and archiving my digital pics. This plus editing, versioning, and exporting to common apps like flickr and gallery.
• Peripheral support for printers, flash drives etc is a no brainer now. These types of issues were always a pain in the past. I don’t think I’ve typed “mount” yet.

What is still painful? Pretty much the only thing was xorg.conf which I expected. Ultimately this is just about experience and it helps to know some people who have that experience. The installation process was straightforward, however, figuring out exactly how to properly setup my RAID-1 array took some trials. To date I haven’t tested that by unplugging drives but will when I have some time.

It’s only been a few days but I’m pretty confident that I’m leaving the microsoft OS world behind me for now. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll come grovelling back in no time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 9:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.