a few days without windoze…
It’s been a few days since I’ve used windows at home. I can’t escape from using windows while at work yet, but details of this movement are another discussion. I must say, there’s nothing that I’ve missed bad enough to boot back into XP. I’ve got my music (Audacious), my chat (Pidgin), my work email via MS Outlook web interface, my personal email via hotmail’s web interface, and browsing via firefox. I’ve got flash installed and everything’s running very smoothly. One thing I need to tackle is getting a good video player installed and also installing codec’s into Firefox to play movies. I can play .flv movies (sites like YouTube), but I can’t play .mpg’s or .wmv’s yet. I haven’t had the time to tackle that just yet.
I did encounter a couple little quirks. When using Putty as an ssh client, I got really used to the behavior that when you highlighted text it automatically copied it to the clipboard. I haven’t figured out how to set up the terminal to do that (or even if it’s supported). I installed Putty, but it was really ugly (to the point of unusable), so I uninstalled it. I’m sure I could have tinkered with the settings, but I didn’t feel like working on it right now.
Another thing I slightly dislike is that when browsing the filesystem using the Explorer-like windows, when double-clicking a folder, it opens it in another window instead of the already open window. I worked around this by making it so that everything is by default in tree mode, so it’s easy to browse through the entire filesystem.
I must say, when I went to install Fedora 9, I was expecting to encounter serious issues with getting my bluetooth mouse to work, but it worked right out of the box….I didn’t have to modify a single config file or do anything special. I was really impressed! I remember back when bluetooth first came out hearing of the horror stories of guys who had to hack their own keyboard/mouse drivers to get it to work. I’m glad I didn’t, because I wouldn’t have done it…..I would have used a cheap dell 3-button ps2 mouse that I have lying around.
Most of my little tools that I set up on windows have been modified to work on my linux install; this includes tools like my auto-playlist builder that recurses through my music library and generates playlist files for each album.
I even found a cool FPS game to install. I was able to get Nexuiz up and running in a matter of minutes. Very CS-deathmatch like. Not quite as refined as Counterstrike, but for free it’s pretty awesome! I’ll be playing it again!
Well, I’m off to bed. Goodnight!