Yes folks, he's back again... that is, the thus-named Dapper Drake version of Ubuntu has once again found a home on my lap top again. This time, however, I left WindowsME installed on the other partition, with the hope that maybe I could just re-boot into Windows, when I wanted to get online, when I am using my laptop.
By the way, for all you folks that are even less familiar with Linux than I am - Linux is an operating system (similar to Windows) – and Ubuntu is a version (distro) of the Linux operating system. If you'll remember from an earlier blog post, days after I received this laptop, I canned XP and installed the Linux OS on it, only to find out that I couldn't get onto the Internet, because this particular distro of Linux wasn't able to recognize my modem.  Well, I can live with that, I guess. Thus, I re-installed Ubuntu today and spent all day messin' around with it to see how a Linux OS works. Hey, the notebook needed an OS, and there's an old saying that “a computer without an OS has a lot in common with a person standing completely naked in Times Square on New Year's Eve.”   he he...well okay, that's not really a saying, I just made that up right now,  but hey..in a way, it's true!.. 
Anyway, as I mentioned, I re-installed Linux onto the laptop because I wanted to use the laptop to experiment with Linux, so I could learn the operating system better. ...and to try a few things I've always wanted to try out for eons! In particular, this program called WINE which, basically, allows you to run windows programs in Linux. I was impressed! I managed to run two Windows games on it, and then I tried to run an emulator that let's you play Atari 2600 games in Windows. Well let's just say I was playing Space Invaders in Linux!  Amazing!
However WINE is not quite finished yet – and, here and there, you can tell. Like for example, there's still no sound yet, and while WINE is to the point now that just about every windows program can now be made to successfully run, sometimes graphics or text will be garbled, or parts of the program show up out of place, or certain functions of a program might not fully work right. However, I'm sure that in time these things will be corrected. Despite these shortcomings, though, again, I was nonetheless pretty impressed. If you are someone who is seeking a real alternative to Windows to eventually run most of your Windows software collection, then this is something I think you should be excited about.  
I learned a lot today. But I must say, though, Linux has somewhat of a learning curve, although as Linux, itself has gotten better and better over the years, that learning curve has gradually diminished – and it will probably continue to do so. Years ago, Linux used to be an incredibly difficult operating system to use. lol...You had to really be a “geek” to know how to use it...(either that or have your own personal geek assistant on stand-by.. ) These days, modern versions of Linux – such as the Dapper Drake version that I am now using – are much more user friendly. I hear “Feisty Fawn”, a later version of Ubuntu is even better.:-D In fact, it received such a glittering review on one tech news site that I am already dying to try it out! The article praising it, was entitled “Feisty Fawn: Linux Matured”. 'Nuff said.
- the Fuchian
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| I'm Digging Dapper Drake Again |
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koyaanisqatsi
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May 19 @ 12:55AM
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Wine certainly does have sound capability. See here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8802
If your goal is to play games, you should check out transgaming's Cedega:
http://transgaming.org/
It's commercial software based on Wine (actually, rewind since Wine is GPL and rewind is BSD style licensing) except they focus on implementing Direct-X (D3D, DirectDraw, DirectSound, etc). It's much more likely to play games well than vanilla Wine.
I was able to finish Half-Life under Wine, but it wouldn't run Half-Life 2. However, Cedega played Half-Life 2 just fine.
On the other hand, if your goal is to run applications like Excel, Word, IE (for whatever ungodly reason) then you should check out Crossover Office which is code based on Wine which focuses on running main software suites.
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