When Penguins Ruled the Earth
June 9, 2011
So, there’s that part of me that always fears straying too far from the warm comfort of Microsoft’s “operating systems.” I don’t want to give up my PhotoShop. I don’t want to give up my Visual Basic. I don’t want to give up — and this is an important one — my NHL09. What do I want to give up? I want to give up the endless drive grinding. I want to shed the shackles of random crashing applications that, despite “compartmentalized memory spaces,” take down the entire OS. I want to shed bloated OSs that grind away in an infinite loop of virtual memory swapping because the OS, itself, takes almost half of the 3GB RAM available to it, thus crippling PhotoShop and FireFox, should I decide to have my normal 5-10 22M photographs open in PS and 22 tabs open in FireFox… The bottom line is that I want to shed an operating system that hinders more than it helps.
With that in mind, it was with a large amount of trepidation that I installed Ubuntu linux on my XP box, Frankenstein. For reference, Frank has been a rock-solid XP Pro box for close to 6 years. It garnered the name Frankenstein because it hasn’t had a case for close to, well, 6 years because it has 4 hard drives a dvd-rw drive, 2 external card readers, 2 4-port USB hubs to which are attached a printer, scanner, three external HDs, my iPod cable, my RP350 effects processor and, occasionally, a TI calculator, which usually supplants the iPod. With close to 600GB of storage, 3GB RAM and a still quasi-zippy 2GHz AMD processor, it was solid, reliable, and my main development machine for all things software development related. Then, one morning, it wouldn’t boot. It couldn’t find the NTLDR. That’s bad, for reference. I tried several repair methods, and I mean several…5?
Since I started this writing, Franky has died. A power supply upchuck and a toasted motherboard really made the OS moot. So, Arkham has replaced it, and after a wiggy power supply on IT, Arkham II is plugging along perfectly happily running Linux Mint 10 and never having to worry about dual booting…all the Windows I need live in very compartmentalized virtual machines and that’s how it’s going to stay.
I’ve been running Linux Mint for close to 18 months, now, and as the sole OS for close to a year. There’s no going back to Microsoft land…there just isn’t.
