Greetings from a newbie

[Peter Whittaker]

On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 10:44 +0000, Master Cougar wrote:
> 
> I am currently
> in the process of migrating from Windows XP to Ubuntu Edgy. Did my
> back ups and preparing to reinstall both as Dual Boot. Got to because
> of my PDA and my iPod.

My $0.02:

Short summary: Evolution and gnome-pilot work well with my Palm V, after
some tweaking. gtkpod works acceptably well but not slickly with my
daughter's iPod. All Edgy, all single boot.

I planned to dual boot my daughter's machine, then didn't, because the
OS disks I had would not let me "just install" Windows, they insisted on
creating a recovery partition. So I went single-boot.

So far, the only hiccough has been that certain games don't play well
under Wine (I'm actively debugging Zoo Tycoon 2, hoping to get bug
reports in CodeWeavers and the Wine folks RSN).

That said, I am extremely satisfied with Edgy both on a vintage 1999
ThinkPad, and a more recent Acer 3000 series. I live on the ThinkPad and
my Palm V syncs very well through the serial port (I may have had to
play with naming/creating the right /dev files, I don't remember, it's
been a while). The only hitch is that the serial port disappears upon
resume, so I sync after a fresh boot. A pain, but I can live with it, I
am motivated.... :->

My daughter and her iPod live on the Acer, which recognizes the iPod
automagically when she plugs it in. We never used iTunes, went straight
to Rhythmbox and gtkpod, so far, so, well, pretty good: Perhaps it's
just me, but I've not found gtkpod all that easy to work with. I've
managed to get her iPod sync'd twice (her library changes infrequently),
but I'm not convinced I could repeat the magic next time....

Summary? Almost everything works, and works pretty well, but, IMHO, one
must still have above-average motivation and above-average computer
skills to use Linux - even Ubuntu - as a day-to-day OS. I wish it were
otherwise, and look forward to 07.10 (the new xorg auto-config stuff
looks way cool), but in the meantime, caveat emptor.

FWIW, my motivation comes from my strong dislike for proprietary data
formats, and, to a lesser extent from my dislike for vendors who force
you to consume their UI kool-aid and work their way. FLOSS is the way to
go, but it ain't mass market quite yet.

Welcome to Ubuntu, it's nice here, and there is no kool-aid.

pww

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