Thanks very much for the tips - I will keep those handy as there is some
useful pointers in there...
Martin Wood-Mitrovski wrote:
I would consider Linux, but I don't think it is marketed as an
alternative to Windows/Mac on the desktop - what I mean is that I know
Linux is out there, because I have used it, but I don't know which
flavour is going to be suitable because there are so many.
well, im an ubuntu fan. used to be debian, but ubuntu is debian made nice.
you can always download the .iso and try it as it can run live from the cd, no
installation required. just install it when youre ready. (or dont)
One thing that has seriously put me off Linux with the desktop side of
things - again this is a perception - is only just starting to get
good. It took me 2 days to get Gnome up and running on RH9 2 years ago
and when I got it running, it looked only marginally better than Windows
3.1 - that sucked.
i think its a lot better these days. gnome works perfectly for me 'out of the
box'. The font settings (smoothing etc) are much more configurable than windows.
The ClearType subpixel system used to give me headaches because of its use of
colour which showed up as red lines against any vertical lines in text, but in
Gnome you can choose to use greyscale smoothing (subpixel is there if you like
it) and you can also control the hinting level, so you might have to tweak it to
suit your monitor and eyes, but the options are there. The cleartype
configuration on windows is frankly rubbish.
Also the default gnome theme uses a lot of space, so I use this theme :
http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/11/04/clearlooks-compact-gnome-theme/
which is particularly good for eclipse. :)
which was designed
If someone could demonstrate that I can transition over from Windows
with only a slight bit of fuss, maintain my own computer without
thinking about it and still use Thunderbird, Firefox, a nice tool like
Flash Develop & Eclipse I would seriously think about switching.
I cant demonstrate everything but I can describe my recent transition.
If you use firefox and thunderbird then moving those is really easy. I did this:
1. Copied the profile folders to my backup drive
2. installed the apps on linux and ran them once to create the new profile
folders
3. replaced the contents of the new folders with the contents of the old ones.
4. Thats it. they both worked flawlessly...bookmarks, filters,
passwords..everything.
Eclipse is also fairly easy, just download it and unzip it. You can save your
eclipse settings from windows and import them in linux.
Ideally if all your projects are in SVN you can just check them out again
because while copying your workspace can work, when it doesnt it can be a bit of
a pain to fix (delete the .metadata stuff, search and replace windows paths with
linux paths in project config files)
I dont know if you can get FlashDevelop running on linux as im pretty sure its a
.net app, maybe mono can handle it, maybe not.
As i said I run xp in a virtual machine ( www.virtualbox.org ) because I couldnt
get flash CS3 running under wine ( www.winehq.org ). Obviously with the VM you
can run any windows software, its a bit slower than just running XP but not a
lot, and I only use it as a last resort when wine doesnt work. For running
something like sqlyog ( www.sqlyog.com ) wine is great.
I used to use ServiceCapture on windows for debugging amf stuff, but again I
couldnt get it to work under wine (although there is a newer version of wine
with a patch which might solve that..i've yet to try). anyway, i took the path
of least resistance and now use Charles instead, which I now prefer as it has a
much wider feature set.
Of course there are other things to consider, particularly hardware, my old
webcam doesnt work with linux, but I wanted another one anyway so my wife could
have one and I only need one for testing flash video stuff.
I would definitely recommend considering the move, but also just take a little
time to look at what software and hardware you have and see if you might run
into problems here or there. and feel free to ask any questions as its something
i've done recently I have a fairly good idea about how to proceed.
this is getting a bit long now, so i'll finish by saying that im more than happy
i moved, just having things like a proper terminal, easy package management
(apt-get rules) and rsync, and decent ssh and cron and .....its like being able
to run after crawling around for years :)
martin.
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Glen Pike
01736 759321
www.glenpike.co.uk <http://www.glenpike.co.uk>
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