To paraphrase a roommate in a conversation about Ubuntu (Linux): “That’s why Ubuntu isn’t mainstream, takes a while to set up.”

You see, that was exactly my experience installing Ubuntu over the past 2 weeks on my machine.

• I had to figure out how to boot and install on my SATA hard drives (fyi – your grub boot line should have “pci=nomsi” in place of “quiet splash”).
• Video drivers are, or at least for me, a nightmare to install.  As you’re probably aware, linux drivers aren’t overly abundant, and nothing annoys me more than a grainy screen when you invested in something that should look real good!  But, after much consultation w/ the owner of zeronothing.com, I learned that because of my onboard Nvidia GeForce card, I had to uninstall ALL previously attempted & installed Nvidia drivers which came w/ Ubuntu.  Luckily, Nvidia had  a GeForce linux driver and WOW….awesome look!  But to get the settings to stick, I had to save the new xorg.conf file as Root/Sudo and I couldn’t figure out how (I didn’t want to change the permissions on the directory, etc.  Once again, zeronothing.com to the rescue!  This makes me embarassed but simply running the Nvidia X Server Settings manager from Terminal, using “sudo nvidia-settings” easily fixed this error and allows my system to use this new driver on reboot!
• Compiz didn’t start automatically, duhhh I had to set my Visual Appearance settings to something other than “None” and then Compiz started on boot….yes!

So three major issues, took forever, plus all the other stuff, such as trying to find which new apps you want to use in place of your old Windoze (Yes I spelled it like you think!) XP apps.

• Banshee for music
• Thunderbird w/ Lightning for e-mails & calendar
• Pidgin for AIM
• Twhirl still……Adobe Air rocks!
• Opera for the web but ughhh don’t like the font rendering so much, Firefox has some bad moments too.
• Bluefish Editor for all my programming: php, xml, html, etc. etc. etc.
• Ubuntu-Tweak for some awesome desktop tweaks and convenience for a few things.
• VLC for videos again – plays ANYTHING!
• VMWare Server to virtualize XP, next up, OSX thanks to some instructions & help from the author of mzdspd.com
• Terminal for everything else!

With that all said, I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu, despite the length of time it took to get the system set up.  I have some awesome keyboard gestures & mouse gestures going on.  It is so much easier than XP or Vista, apps & customization like OSX, but 100% less cost (FREE!).

Therefore, if you have any awesome apps that I need to know about, let me know!  Here’s a few you should try out:

•  htop – an interactive process-viewer for Linux
• Gnome-Do – quickly launch applications
• Ubuntu-Tweak – great tweaks for Ubuntu

Well, I’ll  catch you later on!