I spent most of the weekend installing Ubuntu on my home PC after many, many years of using Windows XP. The transition has been (by and large) successful, so I thought I’d celebrate with a slightly ridiculous pizza and a new blog! This isn’t my first blog – I have, I think, 12… and together they have a grand total of 8 posts, most of which are hello-worldish. I am not the most effective self-facilitating media node.
Anyway, all I have to offer tonight are some bullet points on the subject of my change of OS.
Why I didn’t switch sooner:
- I’m into audio software, particularly trackers. I’m not confident music production is one of Linux’s strong points. For example, I’m still not sure what the state of VST support is in Linux tools (I will be exploring FST very soon), and while there are a few trackers for Linux, the overall Linux tracking ecosystem still seems minimal compared to that on Windows.
- I was, until last night, considered to be the “lead developer” on OpenMPT, an open source tracker for Windows (effectively, the successor to Modplug Tracker). The codebase is heavily tied into Microsoft Foundation Classes. I never had the motivation to seriously investigate making it portable. So as long as I was working with that code, I needed to be under Windows.
- I have concerns about hardware support: will I get the most out of my sound card under Linux? Will my TV Tuner card work smoothly? Will I have to jump through hoops to get songs onto my iPod? How will I be able to use my Garmin E-Trex GPS without MapSource? etc…
- I also have concerns about degradation of “Windows fluency”. I’ve spent countless hours using Windows, and have thereby acquired habits and tools that help me do things quickly. But like Homer, I tend to forget old stuff when I learn new stuff. My work PC will be running Windows for the foreseeable future – will my productivity on that system suffer?
Why I took the plunge this weekend:
- My XP install was getting a touch crufty and I was thinking about a re-install.
- I haven’t really written any code for OpenMPT for over a year. I had no real motivation to get stuck in again, and felt it was probably unfair to keep a reputation as the “lead developer”. Accordingly, my voluntary retirement from the project was announced last night. No codebase is tying me to Windows any more!
- Similarly, it’s been months since I properly tried to compose any music – so I can’t honestly claim that the quality of Linux audio tools is an absolutely crucial factor in the switch (still quite important though!)
- I was feeling impulsive on Saturday afternoon. So I cleared up 50GB on my fastest HD and burnt a Hardy install CD!
Why I can’t say the setup was painless:
- The installer’s drive partitioning tool spent over 15 minutes grinding my discs (not an exaggeration, I timed it) before loading up its UI, during which time I thought the installation had failed miserably.
- My first reboot failed with a slightly scary Grub “error 15″, which eventually went away after I shuffled the boot order in the BIOS and booted back into XP a few times.
- I spent 3 hours tryng to get my Radeon X1950 Pro to show me anything other than a black screen after installing the ATI video drivers through Envy-NG. Even after using fail safe mode to remove the drivers, X just displayed a plain white screen until I reverted back to the original xorg.conf. I finally re-installed the drivers and got them working by fiddling with the AGP aperture size in the BIOS.
- My TV Tuner card (VideoMate DVB T300) just will not work. I’ve messed with modprob as described in this old thread, and at least the system now acknowledges the card is there… but the digital tuner won’t tune (Kaffeine tries for a second then declares that no channels were found), and the analogue tuner tunes with tvtime-tuner, but I can’t use tvtime due to driver incompatibilities.
- I was impressed by how simple it was to get full r/w access to my NTFS drives. But annoyingly the mount points / mappings seem to change every time I boot up.
Despite those issues, it’s not all bad. The software package manager is very cool, Compiz is awesome and following these steps got my audio performance into shape. I’m trying out Renoise (in fact I just bought it – still supporting the tracker community! 
); looks like it’ll be perfectly adequeate should I ever feel the urge to compose again… but I think I’ll miss my Windows VST plugins…
