Search This Blog

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Ubuntu Karmic and Windows 7

Did two upgrades this weekend. Upgraded a laptop from Vista to Windows 7 and a desktop from Ubuntu Jaunty to Karmic, both 64 bit. Pleased with both upgrades so far. Vista was one of MS biggest lows as far as their OS version goes, Windows 7 seems more peppier in general so far.

I have been very pleased with Ubuntu ever since I installed the same. Have previously been a user of Mandriva, Fedora and Suse. Found mandriva comprehensive in its software offering but not very stable. I feel that Suse may be great to compete with Redhat on the server market but is no where as user friendly as Ubuntu. What I like about Ubuntu is that its pretty solid, convenient and just so easy to use. It detects the need for propriety drivers and installs in a breeze. Have dual monitor support without any xorg.conf tweaking. Printer, web cam all worked out of the box. Have it now running Skype as well without a problem.

After installing Ubuntu, I followed the following BLOG on a TODO list that really helped.
Anyway, got rid of the standard 1948 created Gnome menu in favour of AWN and now my desktop rocks.

A note for those installing eclipse 64 bit. One will find that clicking on some buttons does not work and one has use the keyboard actions to activate the buttons. The way around this problem is to set the following "export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true" prior to launching eclipse.

On the Windows 7 front, I prefer using Chrome over firefox or IE as its so much more faster on many sites that I frequent. The upgrade from Dell from Vista to Win 7 was pretty simple. Cannot watch youtube on 64 bit IE yet due to 64 flash plugin not available (no so on my Ubuntu though :-)) Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against Win 7 (except $$$) but when compared with what FREE brings, I find it difficult to justify the extra $$$. I however do need to a Win machine due to the fact that there is no software for the iphone of any value on Linux and that there are sites that I go to such as CWTV to watch videos requiring Win or Mac. Another seller for the Win 7 is my few PC games that I have. BTW, I did not buy Win 7, its a free upgrade option.

The Mrs also is happy with Ubuntu...and as long as she is happy, I am as well :-)

3 comments:

Dave Stockmann said...

did you upgrade vista or do a re-install?

Sanjay Acharya said...

Dell DVD shipped is only an upgrade so had to have vista on before i did the upgrade. But went rather smoothly..no broken links so far :-)

Vimal Krishnan said...

I have to admit, that I like Ubuntu much better that Windows so far. nice post Sanjay ;)