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.

I started with OpenSuse but the release version of SLED 10 is significantly different (better). At the moment I have one licensed version for my work laptop and an eval copy running at home. It is supposed to be an "Enterprise" desktop so $50/yr is not expensive but for home use, yes that would be too much for some people. John On Wed, 2006-09-13 at 18:34 -0500, Bill Reid wrote:

John Lange wrote:

...

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

$50/year/workstation becomes expensive.

or did you use the free SUSE-Linux-10.1?

-- Bill _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

John Lange wrote:

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?

There were reasons why I did not want to go with Windows under VMware, but I didn't specifically address the possibility of Wine as an alternative. My past experience has been that there are a lot of compatibility issues with Wine, and I didn't want to have to test each Windows application I'm likely to run for compatibility with Wine. Also, there were numerous driver issues which also were part of my motivation for not using Linux (at least not at this point).

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.

The on-board nVidia chipset wasn't supported by the open source "nv" driver for Xorg, nor was it even supported by nVidia's own binary-only "nvidia" driver. I had gotten things to work - sort of - with the generic "vesa" driver, but there was no support for DPMS screen blanking, and no support for wide-screen monitors. There were a few other minor driver issues with other hardware, but this was the big one.

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.

That was with my home system, and my Epson RX500 all-in-one photo-grade inkjet printer. The generic driver under Linux works reasonably well for draft-mode printing, but horribly for photo-grade printing, at least on this particular series of Epson printers.

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.)

That is impressive. I've had lots of issues with ATI support for recent video chipsets, as well as with lots of onboard WiFi chipsets. Of course, you are using an older Toshiba and an IBM ThinkPad, both of which are usually quite well supported by Linux. So, your mileage may vary...

I fear you switched just when Linux was finally getting good on the desktop....

It wasn't an easy choice, and I realize that (in general) things are improving with Linux, including with driver support from hardware manufacturers. However, there is still (almost always) a lag between the release of new hardware and decent Linux driver support for it. I happened to get caught up in that in-between time with my new system at work, and didn't want to wait until all these issues resolved themselves. I am keeping a bunch of empty space on the hard drive, with the hope of later installing a new Linux distro there, and will likely switch back to Linux again when things are better. -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil@cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 05:12:25PM -0500, Gilbert E. Detillieux wrote:

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

Excellent, thanks. I'll have a look.

...

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.

I have tried a few Windows shell replacements, such as ports of blackbox and other window managers too. The main catch is that there is usually some program or other which behaves badly under the new setup. I do use virtuawin, which is located at http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/. It's a native Windows app, and basically changes little except for having multiple virtual desktops. I'll probably look at Virtual Dimension as well, but virtuawin is small, light and pretty much everything works OK. Tim