LincolnBlogs

OK, so I caved. I am just tired of fighting to find the few odd bits and pieces I need to feel comfortable using my workstation under PCLinuxOS.. Does that mean that I think that distro is bad, not really, just that I find it easier using Ubuntu.

So I started by installing debian today. It had beena while and I wanted to see what was up. Boy, I had forgotten how fast a non-livecd installation actually is! I had the whole thing up-n-running in 20 minutes. Of course I had to install KDE afterwards, but that took only minutes as well. I thought I was going great until I wanted to get my dual monitors working. That was a nightmare, and at 9pm I just don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. Debian seems great just as long as you don’t have nvidia 😉

Anyhow, on to Ubuntu. I was a little freaked at installing this – especially so late at night. Last time I tried the new live-cd I was unable to get my dual monitors working. I had hoped that if I did the full install, I would have an easier time. Boy am I glad I was right. Let me first start off by saying that I still hate live-cd installers. They are immensely slow. Other than that, Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.10) is FAST. Right now it feels an order of magnitude faster than PCLinuxOS. The first thing that happened after I got it running was I was presented with the option of running the non-free nvidia driver, which I did (wonderful!) and then I copied in my old xorg.conf which gets me my dual monitors back (YAY!)
After all that, I was only a quick “apt-get install kubuntu-desktop” away from having most things working exactly like I want. Whew. I shoulda done this 2 weeks ago. Sure there are a few odds and ends programs that I want which are extras. I’ll grab them as I go along. I know I *can* under Ubuntu, and that’s good enough for me for now.