To me it seems Windows is an OS with built-in expiry date. Sooner or later the system gets slower and slower, the harddrive fragments and I don’t even want to know about the registry. Maybe that is the problem. I am just another user with little to no clue about the inner workings of the OS.
At work I use Linux all day. I am no expert on that one either. But I do know it better and I feel much more secure in trouble shooting than with Windows
So when after installing SP3 my XP installation decided that my key was not “genuine” and started doing weird things – like removing my background image, making me wait every log in and I am not sure what else – I started thinking about getting rid of it.
This Tuesday my second screen died. It was the old 19″ tft not the big one. Still somehow this is what did it.
So yesterday I asked Teno for the loan of one of his small USB drives (1GB is enough), downloaded the current Ubuntu Live image and a tool that creates a bootable system from this image on an USB drive (Unetbootin, Installing Ubuntu from USB). Creating the image is quite easy, a few clicks and you are all set. Just check the file system on your usb drive it saves you about 15 to 20 minutes if you go with FAT instead of FAT32 on the first try (it even says so in the documentation, I was just lazy and paid for it). Then I booted the USB drive and started installing.
I have installed many Linux systems since I first met with SuSe in 1996 and watching Ubuntu do it’s thing yesterday just shows how far Linux has come in those many years. I had put off re-installing my windows since about 2 months – once I saw that Linux was an option it was a matter of 2 days to get myself motivated to do it: because I knew it would be easy and fast.
The stick boots up and you get to see the “Live CD”: a full – if small – Linux desktop that you can use to check out the system. Right after boot I was able to start Firefox and surf the web. There’s an install button on the desktop and while you answer the few questions the installer asks you and decide on a partition scheme – I went with what the tool proposed in the end – you can keep surfing.
The installation started and instead of being bored I surfed the guild homepage, wrote a couple posts and had a good time 
Maybe Windows has become as easy to install. I have no idea. I let other’s do that ugly work for me the last 2 times.
After about 90 minutes – starting with the image download and including having to create the boot disk twice (FAT32 just doesn’t work), I was ready to boot my fresh Ubuntu.
And everything is just there: browser, IM, mail, shell, office, image editing. Of course there is still lots of fine-tuning to do to personalize everything and get my favorite software running. But after just 90 minutes I have a full working system with the most important software installed and access to all my data from the leftover windows partitions – so all the backup work was totally unnecessary (well no it never is! I back up to an USB harddrive)
I found yesterdays experience incredibly impressive.
The best part was installing Wine, clicking on the “activate nvidia drivers” button (oops: rebooting), clicking on the windows games partition to mount it and starting up WoW:
wine "WinGamesPartition/Games/WoW/WoW.exe" -opengl
My first try was without the opengl Parameter and it looked real funny.But the second try was sucessfull. I have the same number of fps on Linux as on Windows. (I decided against using PlayOnLinux at this moment because I do have a working WoW installation and I hate downloading all the patches etc. in case you need to install to Linux PlayOnLinux seems like the way to go.)
However I have a few issues and if any of you have experience playing on Linux I would appreciate hints and solutions to the following questions:
- G15 Keyboard: I have the g15daemon and g15macro installed and running. While g15macro is running I can bind my favorite keys to the G-Buttons. But as soon as g15macro is stopped it forgets all my key-bindings. How do I make G15macro remember the key-bindings? Update: I was able to clear this up. The tool is a bit buggy but there is a workaround on the forums. Basically the tool forgets saving if it is not shutdown in a certain way. So: startup g15macro in the shell, configure and terminate with Ctrl-C. It will save the settings and everything will be fine
- Texture Flickers: WoW starts and I can play but I have issues with non 3D textures flickering. I use oUF Caellian for unit frames and it is quite irritating to see this behaviour there. It also happens with WoW native textures like the Zone Map PvP Icons. How do I get rid of the flickers?
- Logout Problems: On startup I have a few graphics glitches, I can live with that and I can live with startup taking some time (a little more only than on windows). But it is impossible to logout a character and return to the character selection screen. The game hangs up on logout or exit. I have to tab out and kill the process. This is really bad because I play several characters and having to kill and startup the game to switch characters is a big problem. Update: sadly this seems to be an addon problem, with all addons disabled logout takes a while but it works. Hopefully this is a singly bad pea in my addon pot.
- My mouse behaves funny. Let me explain. I have a Razer Copperhead (I broke the first, this is my second one). You all know how to run by pressing both mouse buttons 1 and 2? Well the weird thing is on Linux I have the following behaviour: press the buttons at the same moment I walk backwards, press the buttons slightly apart and I run forwards? Is this known behaviour?
Well so much for now. I will be sure to write more on this. I really need to address the four problems above – well I could live with the last and check out different unitframes. Until I find solutions to these issues I will keep the windows installation. Once these are solved however the next step will be to move my data over and re-partition the windows stuff …
Update: Great information in this German forum thread & the curse client for my addon updates is running!
