More On Breezy Badger
Well, I've been using Ubuntu's Breezy Badger for a couple of weeks now, and I have to say, I'm very impressed by it, compared with both Fedora Core 4, and the previous instalment of Ubuntu, Hoary Hedgehog.
Firstly, it does actually serve all my needs (gaming exempted - though I have done any on Windows for at least a month and a half anyway). It has Open Office 2.0, which works very nicely.
It features the Apache web server, and MySQL - which beats IIS on Windows XP any day. The only trouble I have with this is that I haven't managed to set it up yet - though that's partly because I haven't tried too hard, and partly because I haven't read the documents around it. I'm 90% I know what I need to do, and it's not hard.
Secondly, I've managed to set up Skype nicely - something which didn't get on very well with Ubuntu 5.04 when I tried it. Even better, my USB headset is recognised, and playback is very nice. Hopefully, the microphone, when I try it on someone, will work nicely too, and it'll all be good :)
I managed also to mount the rest of my partitions on to Ubuntu, meaning I now can keep all my files separately from my Ubuntu install - which, given the amount I muck around with it, can only be a good thing. It also means I can access the same documents from Windows (not that I have much reason to).
I've also been playing around with a few Bash scripts, for which I can't think of a Windows equivalent. Windows has batch scripts, but they aren't capable of nearly as much (though you can write some useful scripts). I managed to alter a nice Bash script in order to create a panel launcher which, when clicked, selects a random picture from a directory of short-cuts to pictures in my /home folder. Very useful. However, I want to take it a bit further and configure it so that the background changes every x minutes, like you can configure for Webshots on Windows. For that, I need to do a little bit of reading about Cron, which controls all of this.
Also, I've been thinking about using my PC as an alarm clock - my mobile phone isn't very good at waking me up, and I'd much rather be woken up by a file shouting 'You muppet!' (in-joke, you won't get it), or the BBC's old F1 theme tune on full blast (not sure how much the neighbours will like it, but never mind!), and with my PC already switched on, it has more chance of keeping me awake as I can immediately do email, put music on, etc... before I fall straight back to sleep. I wanted to schedule it using Mozilla's Calendar project, but it doesn't provide the functionality (though I'm sure if I suggested it, to extend the application would be easy - as it's something that is in Thunderbird, and it's use would be very similar - just the prompt would be different), but then I realised if I looked at Cron, and could configure it for my desktop wallpaper, it might be just as easy to configure it to act as an alarm clock. We shall see.
Finally, as I keep saying, Ubuntu is the easiest OS I have ever used to install packages and applications. It's quicker than Windows, far easier than .rpm based distributions too. Debian is great :)
So, I'm happy! I've still got loads of CDs if anyone wants them....
There is currently 1 comment on this article.
AdrianYes, I was a Fedora man until I found that Ubuntu was better for the desktop. Still finding it difficu;lt to get round some of the Debian stuff though, having used Red Hat and Fedora for about four and a half years
2005-12-04 15:18:23