I realized this afternoon that it’s been a week and a half since I booted Windows at home or on my Laptop. My main desktop machine at home runs Debian testing. I was still tied to Windows on my laptop until last Tuesday when I managed to get NDISWrapper working. I’m running Ubuntu Hoary on the laptop and have been for a month or two. Warty didn’t want to play nice with the laptop hardware, and the bleeding edge is the place to be anyway. The Hoary version of NDISWrapper doesn’t work with the latest kernels, so I grabbed the most recent release from sourceforge and it worked like a champ. I’m not completely sorted out, as connecting to open APs and WEP APs work great but I can’t connect to my WRT54G with WPA. It’s not that big a deal though. I just plug in to an ethernet cable at my desk.
I managed to get NDISWrapper going just before PyCon and haven’t looked back at Windows since. Hoary handles speedstepping great, and I’ve fallen in love with bleeding edge Gnome, The Ubuntu Way, and Mono apps like F-Spot and Tomboy.
I’m not completely free from Windows though. I use it quite a bit at work. I try my best to balance it out with my laptop on the right side of my desk connected to the wireless network. I haven’t run in to anything in Photoshop that hasn’t been possible with The Gimp, but I’ve only needed to do simple stuff in it so far. I should really look at how it handles slicing and PSD files with lots of layers.
I have run in to a bit of a problem with hard drive space though. My now-primary Ubutnu partition is only 5 gigs, and I’ve managed to all but fill it. My Windows partition, gathering mothballs, is a heafty 30 gigs. I really need to boot up the partition, back my stuff up to DVD, and give Ubuntu the space it deserves. I’ll probably keep a small Windows partition handy though, you never know when it might be required.
Comments
6 responses to “Kicking that Windows Habit”
Hello Matt,
Your post convinced me into trying to get the WLAN adapter built in my laptop (Acer TM800LCi) to work and to get rid of a PCMCIA WLAN adpater. Unlike your choice, I decided to use the IPW2100 module coming with Debian. Compilation and installation worked fine, I only had slight trouble configuring the network interfaces (dynamic assignment of inames). But voilà … I am posting this via my slightly lighter laptop now running the ipw2100 module.
I do still use MS Windows here and then when I need to access online banking interfaces running proprietary software on Windows only. But it looks like most banks are moving more and more to OS independent online banking solutions … MS should start thinking about opening the Windows 🙂
Dude,
When I switched to Linux back is 2000, I kept my Windows partition around in fear I might need it (for games, scene demos, old data). When I installed FC3, I accidentally wiped out the Windows partition (my fault not Fedora’s) and I haven’t even noticed that it was gone.
I have an Xbox and a Gamecube. When it costs ~$150 for a console that plays Doom 3, it’s almost pointless to enter the upgrade war and spend much more than $150 to get a pc to play Doom 3 or whatever.
I have a 750mhz Duron pc that is running FC3 and I haven’t even thought about needing to upgrade. Where as my old work machine was a 700mhz and we had to buy a brand new Dell to replace it because it was so unuseable with Win2000 Pro, and they say the Open Source software isn’t cheaper.
giles…
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