The New Year Linux Resolution: Day 3

The plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition.

Day Three, Screwing around with some more pre-loaded Linux stuff!

Other days: Day One, Day Two, Day Four, Day Five, Day Six, Day Seven

Yesterday I finally scaled the mountain of Linux, and when I reached the peak I claimed it as The Republic of Me. Unfortunately I only had time to do some basic things like word processing and internetting, so today I’ll get a (very) little bit more in depth. So join me as I screw around with some more pre-loaded Linux stuff!

Being the rogue maverick loose-cannon that I am, my first order of business is to update my software. (No self-respecting rogue maverick loose-cannon would ever risk missing an important update! It would be downright irresponsible.)

This updating is exhilarating stuff! Riding on the high of clicking on my updater and seeing that it will be finished downloading roughly next millennium, I decide I’ll try to figure out Ubuntu’s keyboard shortcuts. Luckily Linux still runs perfectly smoothly with the updater running in the background, so I get to work.

The keyboard shortcuts menu is easy enough to find, and they have a little bit of a learning curve, but for the most part are very similar to the XP or Mac shortcuts. Before I know it I’m ctrl-alt-shifting that shameful update window over to the next desktop. See you in the distant future, update window, when I am long dead and apes or robots or ape-robot hybrids or something have taken over the planet!

Having tasted sweet, sweet Linux shortcut keys for the first time I begin searching for some more user-interface options, and quickly find that there is a visual effects tab in the appearance menu. As far as I can tell it allows you to visualize your desktops on a little cube with each face being a desktop. Sounds fancy!

Unfortunately I will get to experience no fanciness today, as I either need to update the drivers for my video card or my computer is simply too much of a piece of garbage to run the effects. (Don’t worry, it likes it when I call it a piece of garbage: it’s a term of endearment.) Either way I’m not quite willing to go through the trouble of mucking with drivers or anything right now; I like cubes as much as the next guy, but there’s work to be done!

Um, that is, just as soon as I log on to an instant messaging program to exchange very important information over the Internet with people I see face-to-face pretty much every day. I’m glad to see that Ubuntu has provided me with the ability to reduce my productivity by 1000 percent, as they’ve included Pidgin, a universal IM program. I’ve never heard of Pidgin before, but I’ve used other universal IM services before and they never quite did it for me.

Pidgin seems very straight-forward and simple, and looks like it does pretty much everything I want it to with minimal annoyances. It includes connection capability for every IM program I use, and some I never even knew existed.

It also didn’t require any weird configuration like other IM programs I’ve used. I’ll have to use it a bit longer to see if it holds up, but so far I am content with it, and happy to be free from all the ads and junk that come bundled in MSN. (No, I don’t want to watch Rihanna’s latest video, MSN. Thanks for asking though.)

After some rousing conversation the next order of business is to realize how much time I’ve wasted, panic, and begin to hyperventilate furiously. As soon as I wake up from my fainting spell it’s time to get back to work.

That is, as soon as I play a few games. First on the docket is something called Klotski, which I’m assuming is an Eastern-European word that means “free game that comes bundled with Linux.”

After a bit of playing I realize that all the unfamiliar games that come bundled with Ubuntu were actually designed by an alien race possessing of a completely foreign form of logic and reasoning.

I manage to figure out that the point of Klotski is to integrate the hyper-cube into the goal sector via some form of psionic manipulation, but I have yet to translate the mysterious goals of Robots, Tetravex, or Tali. And what the hell is this Sudoku stuff? Like a game about numbers or some junk is going to catch on.

After Robots rewarded me with a spine-tingling scream the umpteenth time I lost, I decided it was time to move on from the games. It is at this point that I realize that I really don’t use my computer for very much: give me a web-browser, a word-processor and a warm blanky and I’m ready to go.

But that means I’m also kind of running out of ideas for what to do with this OS; so far it seems to be working fine, but where’s the adventure?

With that I venture into the Add/Remove programs application to begin my quest for shiny new programs. Before I know it there is a veritable pantheon of programs laid out before me, waiting to be gotten.

The pleases me: I’m no stranger to looking for apps on the web, but it gets tiresome sometimes. Let’s face it, all that clicking, typing, and observing: way too much work. And it seems like it might be especially tiresome looking for Linux apps on the web, given its thinner distribution, so this simple feature is very welcome.

In my journeys I find 7zip, a compression app that I have absolutely never used to unzip copies of SNES Roms, DOSBox, a very solid DOS emulator I’ve used many times to play some of my old favourites, ZSNES, a program I’ve absolutely never used to play the aforementioned Roms that I’ve absolutely never played, and ScummVM, a fantastic emulator designed specifically to play some great old adventure games.

But what I’m most interested in is sound recording software. I find a few mulitrack programs, such as Audacity and Muse, both of which I’ve never heard of, which I’ll have to try later.

Overall I’m very impressed with Add/Remove programs feature. The comfort of knowing that a myriad of programs, which can sometimes be a chore to find, are available at my fingertips ready to be integrated into the OS is quite nice.

It is a very clever feature that other OS manufacturers ought to look into, although I can’t exactly see Microsoft picking it up any time soon. (“So why do we want to put this feature in again? Uh huh, so you’re saying something about it making it easier for people to get programs, but you’re also saying it won’t make us loads and loads of delicious, beautiful money? I’m really not following. You’re going to have to go over this whole thing again.”)

And that’s about it for today. I’m getting a bit deeper into Ubuntu, and the memories of our tumultuous relationship are starting to fade into the past.

So what’s next? I’ve had a few people recommend I try Wubi, another form of Linux that installs along with Windows, and I’m thinking about trying some virtualization software, to see if I can run a few Windows programs in Ubuntu. Any suggestions from readers about what sort of things I can do with Linux next are very welcome!

Stay tuned for my next day when I do something with Linux that is as of yet undetermined!

Other days: Day One, Day Two, Day Four, Day Five, Day Six, Day Seven