As a lifetime Windows user I never really had much experience with Linux but have always been curious. The other day I downloaded and installed the latest version of Ubuntu Linux and I have to say I’m impressed. It installed with very little trouble, didn’t destroy my copy of XP which was already installed, and most features seem to work. I’m a network admin running a 2003 domain and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I can access network shares, printers, and could even setup the included email client with my Exchange server, all with little to no effort. I can browse the internet, get updates to the operating system, and download/install any apps that might be useful. It even comes with an RDP/VNC client which works great with Windows servers and desktops.
So this is just my way of spreading the word now that I see the value of it. Being free there is nothing to lose in trying it aside from a little time. Give it a try, you may be pleasantly surprised like I was.
Don’t you have to enable Outlook Web Access to get Evolution working with Exchange, though?
I’ve got a fun little thing, I’ve got the entire distro running off a 1 gig flash drive. Stick it into any computer that’ll boot off flash, and I can do whatever I want. Based it on the liveCD, so it autodetects things, and I can add whatever drivers or programs I want, as well.
Yes, it was on already so no big deal there. I like the idea of a USB Live version, makes it almost impossible to screw things up which would be good for me.
There’s just one issue: Sometimes the USB stick likes to bork itself.
So I just reformat, copy files over, rebuild. Lemme just check the menu.lst.
This is the final one. There you go. Have fun! I’ve got a wifi card on mine, using the ndiswrapper tool that lets you use windows drivers, I’ve got an antivirus scanner… I’ve even got partimage for images. Basically, with the wifi USB card, I can plug this girl into any computer within range of a work router, boot it, and reimage it. Or recover any file to a network folder, or scan it for viruses (clamav)
Handy, huh?
Oh! The most important thing. Go to evolution, and enable options as appropriate. Show hidden files, send directly to delete, not trash can… (Especially important on the USB drive). Check what you can add to the taskbar. I like the RDP client, the CPU and power monitors… and the network manager is essential. Oh, and the mounted drive monitor. Go crazy, have fun. Don’t forget to get the proper sources list for downloading stuff. Go here. http://www.ubuntulinux.nl/source-o-matic
Hm… Oh, the Captive driver operates like ndiswrapper, and encapsulates the Windows ntfs driver, for the ability to read and write to a NTFS drive natively. http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/
Handy.
Sounds like my setup is similar to E-Sabbath’s. I’m a tester for a program that has to run on a few different varieties of Linux, so I’m constantly re-imaging test machines with different distros. We’ve got multiple partitions on the hard drive, and we just have to install each OS once and then save it to a .tar file. For a clean test setup, I can just unpack that saved setup to any partition and reboot. We do it with scripts, I don’t even have to touch the machine.
Which is one of the great things about Linux. Once you know what you’re doing (and, admittedly, that part does take some effort) you can improvise. I can use all the tools to make the machine do what I want, instead of just what the OS is nice enough to allow.
