uBuntu

I’ve been using a dual-boot setup (Linux and XP) for a few years now but I never really used Linux much. The Linux part was purely academic and just me wanting to try new stuff. I thought it took too much time to customize linux and it didn’t look pretty. After trying SuSe, RedHat, Fedora I stumbled onto uBuntu. During this time I was getting frustrated by XP and played very few games if any. This got me thinking of switching over to Linux as my primary OS, but I had my doubts.

I upgraded my uBuntu to version 7.04 Feisty and installed Compiz for better looking themes, windows, OSX like effects and screenlets. It took a bit of reading docs to get it to work but the end result was simply amazing ! Here’s a screenshot of my desktop:

With uBuntu beauty just isnt skin deep, here are some highlights:

• Synaptic Package Manager can help you search for apps and take care of dependencies. Much better than having to use rpms.
• NTFS support built-in, so it automatically mounts your Windows partitions. All my documents, music, movies, videos are on my XP NTFS partitions and I can use them in Linux .
• Deluge as my Bit Torrent client. I was afraid I wouldn’t find a light-weight client like uTorrent (Windows only, unless you run it on Wine) in Linux, but Deluge is like a uTorrent clone for Linux.
• Banshee for my music library. Once again I could just import my music library from the XP partition. It supports album covers, looks slick and pops up pretty notifications.
• VLC which plays almost any video file format out there. And it plays them well.

The last step is installing an external hard drive. I’ll write about it soon .