My Evolution from MS DOS to Apple to MS to Linux
August 15, 2006 - Linux - Almost 99% My Favorite OS - Probably No Vista
I had a TI-99, a Commodore 64 and a ColecoVision in the early 1980s. My father bought me / sibling our first IBM PC compatible in 1987. It was a Leading Edge PC running MS DOS and used 5 1/4" floppies. In college, I used the PC for a while and then converted to an Apple Macintosh. As an engineering student, we had to crunch numbers using heavy-duty spreadsheets and math / engineering programs. The Macintosh worked well for this purpose. Macintosh had the "cool" factor, however, in the early 1990s, Mr. Bill Gates et al were taking large pieces of marketshare away from Apple. The PC had better pricing for software, hardware, and support compared to Apple - so I made the switch back to the PC.
I have worked through every variant from MS starting with DOS and ending with Windows XP - patching, upgrading, fixing, struggling, etc. Over the past few years I have invested too much $ in hardware and peripherals that are dependent on Windows drivers, so switching back to Apple was not economically viable. I even tried SUSE Linux in 2003, however, the GUI and ease of setup left a lot to be desired. I've studied BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, C++ and JAVA, etc. in college, but I didn't want to invest a lot of time in getting SUSE to work as a basic OS.
In early 2006, my XP box decided (overnight) that it would not recognize my CD ROM and DVD RW. I found the registry fix on Google, however, this Windows XP malfunction was the last straw for me - I migrated to Linux. I went to www.distrowatch.com and tried the top 5 distros at the time. I settled on Ubuntu 5.10 - easy to use, easy to setup and had what I believe to be a very nice UI. Taking advantage of my Konica Minolta 2400W and my Epson C82 is still not 100%, but, the OS is very stable and just works. I upgraded to Dapper 6.10, and have never looked back.
To get the printer driver support of Windows XP and the stability / clean UI of Linux, I have done the following:
1 - I have a P4 1.8 box - upgraded the hard drive to 160GB and 768MB memory
2 - Installed the free VMWare player (updated on August 15, 2006 by VMWare www.vmware.com)
3 - Downloaded and installed the Ubuntu 6.10 VMWare machine (from the website)
4 - Updated Ubuntu 6.10 using Synaptic (a great way to upgrade)
5 - Updated everything else using Automatix (www.getautomatix.com)
After all of these years, my PC is almost where I want it (if Linux would support all of the features of the Konica Minolta 2400W and my Epson C82, it would be 100%). Unfortunately I do not believe that either Konica Minolta nor Epson have a vested $$$ interest in writing drivers for Linux. Also, companies such as Quickbooks really need to support Linux for their web-based products.
At this point I do not believe I will upgrade to Vista. Ubuntu Dapper 6.10 really is a secure, impressive, flexible and powerful OS.
I had a TI-99, a Commodore 64 and a ColecoVision in the early 1980s. My father bought me / sibling our first IBM PC compatible in 1987. It was a Leading Edge PC running MS DOS and used 5 1/4" floppies. In college, I used the PC for a while and then converted to an Apple Macintosh. As an engineering student, we had to crunch numbers using heavy-duty spreadsheets and math / engineering programs. The Macintosh worked well for this purpose. Macintosh had the "cool" factor, however, in the early 1990s, Mr. Bill Gates et al were taking large pieces of marketshare away from Apple. The PC had better pricing for software, hardware, and support compared to Apple - so I made the switch back to the PC.
I have worked through every variant from MS starting with DOS and ending with Windows XP - patching, upgrading, fixing, struggling, etc. Over the past few years I have invested too much $ in hardware and peripherals that are dependent on Windows drivers, so switching back to Apple was not economically viable. I even tried SUSE Linux in 2003, however, the GUI and ease of setup left a lot to be desired. I've studied BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, C++ and JAVA, etc. in college, but I didn't want to invest a lot of time in getting SUSE to work as a basic OS.
In early 2006, my XP box decided (overnight) that it would not recognize my CD ROM and DVD RW. I found the registry fix on Google, however, this Windows XP malfunction was the last straw for me - I migrated to Linux. I went to www.distrowatch.com and tried the top 5 distros at the time. I settled on Ubuntu 5.10 - easy to use, easy to setup and had what I believe to be a very nice UI. Taking advantage of my Konica Minolta 2400W and my Epson C82 is still not 100%, but, the OS is very stable and just works. I upgraded to Dapper 6.10, and have never looked back.
To get the printer driver support of Windows XP and the stability / clean UI of Linux, I have done the following:
1 - I have a P4 1.8 box - upgraded the hard drive to 160GB and 768MB memory
2 - Installed the free VMWare player (updated on August 15, 2006 by VMWare www.vmware.com)
3 - Downloaded and installed the Ubuntu 6.10 VMWare machine (from the website)
4 - Updated Ubuntu 6.10 using Synaptic (a great way to upgrade)
5 - Updated everything else using Automatix (www.getautomatix.com)
After all of these years, my PC is almost where I want it (if Linux would support all of the features of the Konica Minolta 2400W and my Epson C82, it would be 100%). Unfortunately I do not believe that either Konica Minolta nor Epson have a vested $$$ interest in writing drivers for Linux. Also, companies such as Quickbooks really need to support Linux for their web-based products.
At this point I do not believe I will upgrade to Vista. Ubuntu Dapper 6.10 really is a secure, impressive, flexible and powerful OS.
posted by from JJ Nathan, MBA at 12:50 PM
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