publicenergy

It was only a couple of days ago when I posted about the posibility of me using Linux and still being able to easily process my photos. Well, since then I’ve sorted out some niggles and got to the point where I’m actually enjoying using it.

The relevance of the screen photo above is that I switched the order of the boot menu to make OpenSUSE the default instead of the second choice. I’m not running away from Windows because I have problems with it or I have some irrational hatred of Microsoft. Windows Vista has worked just fine for me since I installed it in January 2007. I went for the 64 bit version of Vista so I was initially without a driver for my scanner, but that was about the worst problem I had really and I blame that on Canon rather than Microsoft because Epson had all of theirs ready! Some things weren’t compatible with the 64 bit version, but from what I’d read, the 64 bit version of Vista was intolerant of the liberties that Windows programmers had been taking for years, so I was quite happy to wait for fixed versions of software. Even here, the only thing that really broke for me was a trail version of Nikon’s Capture NX.

So, why am I running Linux and, in all probability, going to eventually ditch Windows? Well, a change is as good as a rest! - I work with Windows every day of my working life - on my own work PC, on the desktops and laptops that my colleagues use, on the multiple servers that I look after and on various customers machines. Windows is everywhere. If I work from home, then I was only using my home Windows PC to connect to a remote session to do my work - so as long as that capability is there in Linux (it is), then I have no work related downsides. The one very big upside though is that my home desktop looks very different to anything I work with so it’s more of an escape from one world and not a direct reminder of work!

I still have the option of going back in to Windows - I’m not making the ultimate sacrifice and getting rid of it completely. I’ll leave that safety blanket there for some time!

My biggest worry was that processing photographs would be a huge pain. It’s not though - I managed to grab a load of photos from my memory card today, file them and edit a few in a fairly simple way and upload them to Flickr. I’m going to take some time to watch some tutorial videos and get up to speed on some of the software. The things I miss most about Windows are two pieces of software - FeedDemon and Lightroom - both are really best of breed in their own fields and I’ve seen nothing that comes anywhere close to either of them yet. Having said that, I don’t think this is entirely terrible and I think with a bit of effort I’ll get over it.

I’m quite impressed with myself (!) that I have managed to:

• Get Flash working in 64 bit linux after navigating lots of user forums with people arguing with each other about it and finally finding the one paragraph where somebody had a workable solution. Flash now works and I can pretty much use any site with Flash on it, with only a few slightly odd occurances!
• Sort out my graphics problems - the latest version of something called CompizFusion stopped my title bars from disappearing if all of the fancy graphics options were enabled. So it now looks nice!
• Installed the last.fm player which works exactly the same way as the Windows version so I can listen to radio.
• Installed SqueezeCenter - this is the software from Slim Devices that makes my Squeezebox work! I needed to install MySQL first to get this going, but it worked fine. The only down side to this was that visiting the Slim Devices web site showed me all of the nice stuff they’re making these days that make my old device look a bit old. It is still lovely though! :)
• Last and by no means least, I managed to catch up with the latest Battlestar Galactica thanks to Pan and VLC.

I’d still like a Linux version of FeedDemon though!