Well, it's been about a month since Aric, Bobby, and Wes convinced me to change to Ubuntu from XP on my laptop. The change has been worth it. How so? Let me list off the reasons:

• My battery will charge more often. Since the change, I have kept nearly a full battery charge. With XP, it was a crapshoot.


• I have much of the same operations that I got with Windows. I can IM, Flickr, use the Internet, wired or wireless. There's not much I could only do on Windows. The exception would be iTunes. That's not too hard to fix. My desktop still has Windows on it. All I have to do is burn my paid iTunes songs to CD and then rip them to mp3s on this computer.


• Using JAVA is not a hassle. As I told Aric yesterday, when I used JAVA on my XP set up, I'd fall asleep before my JAVA Applet would load and work. Okay, I'm exaggerating on that. However, JAVA working on Ubuntu is a lot faster than on XP. The only difference? Operating Systems. The hardware is all the same.


• I don't have to reboot as often when I update files. I think after downloading updates, I've had to reboot my computer once. With Windows, with the number of updates I did do in the past month, I would have rebooted about 5 times. Much nicer.

And I'm sure there's more I can list off, but I just can't think of them. All I know is that I like what I have.

Aric told me I should try out Beryl by looking at some YouTubing some videos. I downloaded it this morning. I wish I could take a screen shot video of it, but I haven't figured that stuff out, yet. However, here's a short video from YouTube that shows Beryl working on Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn:

I like what I have done so far. I've got an interesting setup that is all me.

I've been proud of myself with what I have done with Ubuntu. Okay, so I needed Aric to get AMP installed. Now that's done, I shouldn't have too much problem with MySQL server and PHP scripting I'll need to do this summer. I've also installed some stuff on my own on this computer: XMMS, Google Earth, Picasa, Pidgin, Real Player, JAVA Virtual Console, and Beryl, to name a few. I even had Aric fooled into thinking I had Winamp on this because XMMS lets you use Winamp skins on it.

Next Saturday, the local Linux users group is having a meeting. One of their members invited the ACM members to last month's and future meetings. I missed last month's meeting. I think I'll go next week. It never hurts to broaden your horizons. Besides, we don't really learn anything Linux related in the IT program. It's quite depressing if I think about.

Speaking of school, I did make the Dean's List for the Spring Semester. Time for the Shuttle Launch.

[♪ Listening to: "Save The Day" - Train]

Posted by Shawn at June 8, 2007 7:34 PM in Geek, YouTube.