Today i downloaded and installed the most recent version of Ubuntu. For those unfamiliar with the word, Ubuntu is the linux distribution often labelled as the one easiest to use. Probably it’s right, but still linux is linux. Here you have to sudo to install the mp3 codecs, in exchange you don’t have to worry about security. I still recall how long i looked for a usable firewall for linux, but then rather gave up… I hope the university router will protect me for most of the time now. Also, it only takes typing in the search box to find and install most programs i’d ever want to use–in case they weren’t preinstalled (examples of such: Mozilla’s Thunderbird mailing client, Pidgin, VLC, GIMP, Azureus (still not used to calling it Vuze), SciTE, the Apache server and PHP for it, just to name the most important).
Thus from now on i’ll be mostly hanging on linux instead of Windows. I say “most of the time”, because as you can guess, i’ll still be going under Microsoft’s oft-cursed operating system to edit images (Fireworks) and to play (Warcraft). And, to test my designs on Windows browsers as well (couldn’t find Safari for linux, though i’m not surprised, it’s the Internet Explorer of the next generation).
I’m really happy with this system for now, though there are a bunch of stuff i’ll have to tweak for my own taste–as expected. My drives, although mounted, do not show up in “Computer”, for one, no volume control icon, for two, and i’ll write a quick script with which i’ll be able to ping last.fm about my listening to an internet radio. They don’t support that by default, so i’ll be doing it manually. It’ll be interesting to do shell scripting again, after more than a year…
Also, lynxes and big cats of their kind are simply cool. And this one’s lucid too.
