> I would consider Linux, but I don't think it is marketed as an > alternative to Windows/Mac on the desktop - what I mean is that I know > Linux is out there, because I have used it, but I don't know which > flavour is going to be suitable because there are so many.
well, im an ubuntu fan. used to be debian, but ubuntu is debian made nice. you can always download the .iso and try it as it can run live from the cd, no installation required. just install it when youre ready. (or dont) > One thing that has seriously put me off Linux with the desktop side of > things - again this is a perception - is only just starting to get > good. It took me 2 days to get Gnome up and running on RH9 2 years ago > and when I got it running, it looked only marginally better than Windows > 3.1 - that sucked. i think its a lot better these days. gnome works perfectly for me 'out of the box'. The font settings (smoothing etc) are much more configurable than windows. The ClearType subpixel system used to give me headaches because of its use of colour which showed up as red lines against any vertical lines in text, but in Gnome you can choose to use greyscale smoothing (subpixel is there if you like it) and you can also control the hinting level, so you might have to tweak it to suit your monitor and eyes, but the options are there. The cleartype configuration on windows is frankly rubbish. Also the default gnome theme uses a lot of space, so I use this theme : http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/11/04/clearlooks-compact-gnome-theme/ which is particularly good for eclipse. :) which was designed > If someone could demonstrate that I can transition over from Windows > with only a slight bit of fuss, maintain my own computer without > thinking about it and still use Thunderbird, Firefox, a nice tool like > Flash Develop & Eclipse I would seriously think about switching. I cant demonstrate everything but I can describe my recent transition. If you use firefox and thunderbird then moving those is really easy. I did this: 1. Copied the profile folders to my backup drive 2. installed the apps on linux and ran them once to create the new profile folders 3. replaced the contents of the new folders with the contents of the old ones. 4. Thats it. they both worked flawlessly...bookmarks, filters, passwords..everything. Eclipse is also fairly easy, just download it and unzip it. You can save your eclipse settings from windows and import them in linux. Ideally if all your projects are in SVN you can just check them out again because while copying your workspace can work, when it doesnt it can be a bit of a pain to fix (delete the .metadata stuff, search and replace windows paths with linux paths in project config files) I dont know if you can get FlashDevelop running on linux as im pretty sure its a .net app, maybe mono can handle it, maybe not. As i said I run xp in a virtual machine ( www.virtualbox.org ) because I couldnt get flash CS3 running under wine ( www.winehq.org ). Obviously with the VM you can run any windows software, its a bit slower than just running XP but not a lot, and I only use it as a last resort when wine doesnt work. For running something like sqlyog ( www.sqlyog.com ) wine is great. I used to use ServiceCapture on windows for debugging amf stuff, but again I couldnt get it to work under wine (although there is a newer version of wine with a patch which might solve that..i've yet to try). anyway, i took the path of least resistance and now use Charles instead, which I now prefer as it has a much wider feature set. Of course there are other things to consider, particularly hardware, my old webcam doesnt work with linux, but I wanted another one anyway so my wife could have one and I only need one for testing flash video stuff. I would definitely recommend considering the move, but also just take a little time to look at what software and hardware you have and see if you might run into problems here or there. and feel free to ask any questions as its something i've done recently I have a fairly good idea about how to proceed. this is getting a bit long now, so i'll finish by saying that im more than happy i moved, just having things like a proper terminal, easy package management (apt-get rules) and rsync, and decent ssh and cron and .....its like being able to run after crawling around for years :) martin. _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
