While I'm transfering my Hacker's sound track from my server to my PC here, I thought I'd update on my situation. I think I'm on day 3 of going without Windows. And to be honest, I have to admit I'm starting to feel some pangs of ..  well, some slight discomfort once in a while.

Complaint 1: For instance there's this trouble of trying to figure out how to "map a network" drive that I can't seem to resolve. That I've been told is probably because I'm using a "pretend" OS (FC6) instead of something more stable like Debian. Well..   sure. Maybe. But still, no flavor of linux has a "share my folder" option like windows, or at least nothing that is as easy to setup as that. And the "client" side of it is just about as badly screwed up from what I can see. My work around for now is to just copy music to my local harddrive to play. Which really all considering isn't all that bad.

Complaint 2: Printer setup, at least printer setup for a printer that is connected to a Windoze box and shared from that seems to cause some weird issues as well. Admittedly this might be the same complaint as 1, but two totally different areas of impact for me. 

Complaint 3:  Adobe Reader! Man. This seriously was enough for me to almost scrap this idea all together. The only thing that really saved it was another attempt at using KPDF which turns out was what I needed to get the job done. My issue with this is that upon being launched, it proceeds to spawn 3 child processes that take up 100% of the CPU with no end in sight. Only way to gain control back is to SIGTERM them. 

Some other things that I haven't tackled yet:

- Palm Pilot

I have a LifeDrive as anyone who's looked around my site for more than 30 seconds knows, and unfortunately it's doesn't use  just the standard Hotsync software to connect. It also uses the "LifeDrive Manager" to manipulate media files. So for now, my LifeDrive is essentially disconnected from my computers. 

-  Burning CD's/DVDs

Got two new DVD burners for Christmas, and not sure how I can use them on here at the moment. Kind of a bummer.

- Camera/Pictures

My Olympus camera doesn't have any software with it, or at least I never installed any, which is nice actually. It simply acts as a USB drive, which brings me to my next challenge...

 - USB "Thumb" drive

I know there is a way to mount this somehow in linux, but I haven't tried. I need to backup all my stuff that's on there and try plugging it in to see what happens.

 That's a list of stuff. It really is. And some of it may or may not have any kind of solution or work around. A few of the things are pretty big items. But all in all, if that's all I have to accomplish to mostly push Windows out of my life, not too bad.

I'll post some screen shots of my "effeciently" modified desktop environment some point later. Definitely has come in handy for flipping back and forth between applications and such.

First comments I've got are regarding on how I got to this point (No windows on my main PC). Essentially I've been forced into this position. My first idea was to just use VMWare or M$'s answer to that, VirualMachine 2007 or something along those lines. Well, the install of FC6 went ok, and it worked under VMWare and if I only need to do occasional stuff in it, it would be great. But I dont. I spend hours hacking out C code for various weird classes I take. So that wasn't going to cut it. Next I thought I'd do the dual boot thing. Now, I should mention here I've seen hundreds of these setups work on lots of my friends computers and never expected any trouble. But for some reason my 160gig Hitachi HDD couldn't be partitioned to work with Linux to save it's life (tried using Partition Magic 8 in Windows first, and then resulted to formatting and deleting the volumes on the drive which for some reason still wouldn't work). So. Out came the spare 30 gig hard drive. 

The install went fine, used to the DVD ISO. (As opposed to my Inspiron 8100 troubles) Recompiled the 2.6.20 kernel and installed Nvidia's driver. Rebooted and FULLY expected the "Desktop-effects" to be "enable-able". Nope. Well, no big worries. With my FX6200 graphics card I know that I can make it work somehow with some elbow-grease and time. I was getting around 1700 frame/sec on the glxgears, which seems slightly above average from a quick browse online. Then I started digging around in the "KDE Environment" of the "add/remove programs". Found two small GUI applications that really enhance the desktop manager. Kooldock and Kompose'. Kooldock is a taskbar replacement as far as I'm concerned. Put your frequently used programs in the quick launch area, put your start (K) button in there for access to everything else. Your current applications show up on it when you run them just like the average task bar. And best of all, it's got the one of the slickest auto-hide features I've ever seen. So when you're not looking for your tasks or applications, you don't see them until you hover your mouse over the lowest part of the screen. The other, Kompose', gives you a top-view of all your desktops with running programs neatly arranged so you can see them all. To switch to a different desktop or application, move your mouse over it and click. To activate the preview, setup a global-short cut. Windows-key+tab is the default. I had problems with this (my windows key might not work) so I changed it to "ctrl-tab" but it works just fine with that. 

My only problem so far with the change from Windows to FC6 is multimedia stuff. XMMS seems to be the best answer for replacing my dear old Winamp. But having to download all the seperate plugins just to play the music was kind of disappointing. Also, I'm running into a problem with trying to access a shared folder(via Samba) on my FC5 server. I can see the folders and files, but can't r/w/x them. More on this later.