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So things have started to get a little hectic here at the end of the semester. I have to give a presentation of my paper in class on Tuesday, and I'll be pretty much castrated by my classmates' constructive criticism in the following Q&A. After that I'll have until Friday to get my paper into its final form, a twenty page behemoth of solid arguments. At this point my paper is at best a mildly persuading harp seal. It's certainly the longest paper I've written, even in its incomplete form, but it's certainly not going to blow the lid off of Apuleian scholarship, which I am essentially expected to do. After the paper I'll have my final exam to study for, which will be on the next Tuesday, exactly a week after my presentation.

SO! You might think that will these big assignments creeping up on me, I'd be using this time to get some daily studying done. Not so much. Instead I have spent the last few days working very hard, not at my job, but here in front of my computer. I've probably spent the majority of the past 36 hours getting used to my new OS: Ubuntu!

This past week the newest version of the Linux/GNU based Ubuntu (oo-boon-too) was released: 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Clever name, eh? So for maybe about the last month, I've been reading up on the mission of these open source developers, and it's all really quite interesting. As with most forms of Linux, it's completely free, and you are able to customize things you'd never even thought of customizing. What makes Ubuntu stand apart from the rest of the Linux distributions is that it is designed with the user in mind, and with a strong sense of community. New users are able to migrate their files easily from Windows, and if a question arises the Ubuntu forums are full of helpful people. The word ubuntu itself even means something like humanity towards others.

Also, there are a number of Ubuntus to choose from. The main difference between them is the desktop environment used, Ubuntu uses Gnome, Kubuntu uses KDE, and Xubuntu uses Xcfe. Now of course that meant nothing to be a week ago, but basically it means that there are subtle differences in the interface. For someone like me who used Windows his entire life, it makes little difference which I choose, as they are all a new experience. I opted to go the route of Xubuntu (zoo-boon-too) for now, because it is specifically designed to use less memory, and as I still am dual booting with Windows at this point, I tried to make as little impact of my old computer as possible.

So anyway, the last few days have been an awful headache as I tried to figure out everything that you'd think would be easy. In retrospect once I found out what I was doing wrong each time I hit a wall, it really was quite simple. Microsoft, and even Apple I must admit, trains you to rely on pretty buttons and menus, and you lose touch with what is really happening in your system. Now, I don't want to make it seem as if Ubuntu makes you agonize through source code it order to do the most basic things, that's not quite true. Your average person really only uses a computer for a few things. Browsing the web, checking email, IMing, listening to music, watching videos, and doing work. From the moment Ubuntu finishes installing you have the ability to do most of these things. All you really have to do is open up Synaptic Package Manager, and you are given a list of every program the Ubuntu community supports. Highlight a few programs you think you'll need, and it installs it all for you. If you stumble upon a problem, it's a quick look at the forums, and odds are many new users have had the same question as you. Now if you want to do something more complicated, like set up a complex firewall that blocks only certain protocols, or want the certain drives to be mounted upon start-up, you'll need to learn the basic function of the terminal, but even then I was able to do that pretty quickly. I think probably gaming is a bit harder to get the hang of, but I've never been a PC gamer, and even then, there are plenty of Linux gamers out there to help you.

So the question I asked myself about 15 hours ago was, what's the point? I don't use my computer for much outside of music, video, blogging, and email. Why bother putting up with having to learn a whole new system when you could just use Windows? Well aside from the astronomical costs of Windows, and MS Office, Linux is truly amazing once you get the hang of it. There is such a feeling of satisfaction, at least for me, when after an hour of trying to figure out why the hidden system file wasn't being edited when asked to, you realize that you left out a letter in: sudo gedit /etc/fstab, and suddenly you understand exactly what was moments ago gibberish and jargon. And of course, workspaces are just fucking awesome. The main reason I was so excited about the new Mac OSX coming out this fall was because they ripped off this common Linux feature. Basically you have the ability to toggle through as many different desktops as you want. Then you can configure control through the mouse so you can just slide your cursor to the end of the screen, and hop over to the next screen. I set up shortcut keys as well so when every I press the windows key + some other button I can jump right to the other screens. It's as if I have five monitors sit by side. This is real handy because I can have Firefox open in one entire workspace, Instant Messenger in another, Banshee (a spot on Linux iTunes clone) in another, random widgits and file manager in another, and then one to watch DVDs and videos. I provide you with an example of this,from my own setup, below.

Finally, you really can put anything you want on your panel (startbar). You can put it anywhere on the screen, have as many as you want, and put whatever content you can think of on there. I opted to make a very Windows-esque design, but it can really look like whatever you want it to, even going as so far as removing it completely and just using icons and folders on the desktop if you want (kinda like the old Windows 3.11). Anyway, I still have one or two things to tinker with a bit, but after that I don't see any reason to boot up Windows anytime soon. Thanks for reading this far if you did. Apparently I've been something of a novice techie all my life, it's just Latin so rarely gave me the chance to express that.