I also regret that I missed the meeting but I have one question which was probably asked at the meeting.
Instead of going Windows and kludging it with *nix apps, why not go Linux and run the one or two things you need from Windows with Wine?
I see from the slides that drivers were a major part of your motivation so that obviously wouldn't be solved with Wine but that seems to be less and less of an issue these days as pretty much all the major device makers are releasing drivers for Mac and Linux. Not knowing specifically what devices are giving you grief its hard for me to judge.
You did mention printers; I haven't had a problem with printer drivers for quite a while now especially HP printers which have drivers shipped with most every distro now.
I recently installed Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on a machine and I was so impressed I've been installing it on all my desktop machines. So far I put it on two laptops (an old Toshiba satellite pro, and an IBM Thinkpad T42), in both cases everything, and I mean _everything_ worked right out of the box (yes, including the ATI drivers for onboard video card and the dual head display, onboard Wifi etc.)
I fear you switched just when Linux was finally getting good on the desktop....
Of course, that being said Windows does have its uses. Besides being the number one platform for spyware it also makes a pretty good gaming machine. ;) In fact I keep one around for just that purpose.
John
On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 17:12 -0500, Gilbert E. Detillieux wrote:
Tim Lavoie wrote:
I was hoping to go, but couldn't make it. How *does* Gilbert make make a happy transition. (and of course, why?)
I've updated the meeting write-up online to include the slides of my talk and bookmarks for the various utilities I described...
http://www.muug.mb.ca/meetings/06-07.html#sep
I have to use MS-everything for work, but do use putty, Cygwin and VNC for at least accessing remote Linux systems or the Cygwin shell utilities where I can.
We're pretty much on the same page, then. I also mentioned a virtual desktop utility called "Virtual Dimension", the "True X-Mouse Gizmo for Windows", and several handy extensions for Thunderbird (a couple of which work in Firefox too), which I've found useful to add.