Switching to Ubuntu
It’s took me a while but I’ve switched to Ubuntu completely. This is something I thought I’d never do. Ubuntu has lots of nice features, but I’d always boot back in to Windows when I wanted to get something done. The past few months I’ve been using it more and more and have decided to switch over completely.
Encrypted Partitions
This excellent guide on encryption with Ubuntu by Martti Kuparinen helped me encrypt all my partitions (except /boot) on my laptop. All you need to do is enter a password at startup and you’re good to go.
Tomboy Notes
I’m an avid note taker so Tomboy was one of the first applications that jumped out at me. It’s simple and always sitting in the tray ready to use. The only thing that’s missing is a Firefox extension. I do a lot of copying and pasting between Firefox and Tomboy so I’ve started writing an extension. It adds a “Create Note” option in to Firefox’s right click menu when text is selected. It’s working pretty well at the moment, there are still a few bugs when adding text containing special (or weird) characters which I need to take care of. But when it’s working reasonably well I’ll upload it in case others find it useful too.
Printing
Adding a printer in Ubuntu was something I was a bit concerned about. Will it have the right driver? Will my printer be compatible? So, I got a huge surprise when it discovered my printer (a network printer), auto-detected the model and installed the proper driver in seconds. Adding printers in Windows feels like a chore compared to this. On a related note, being able to browse Windows shares was something I didn’t expect I could do without a fuss. I’ve setup Samba in the past on a Debian server and found it tricky at the time. It works so well in Ubuntu and this was one of the main reasons I was able to switch.
My ATI Graphics Card
This is the only downside, and it’s not Ubuntu’s fault. The driver support for my ATI card isn’t good on Linux. They release a new driver once a month, hopefully things will improve soon…
