::A Geek in Korea::

Last week I had been touting my ease of adjusting to Ubuntu 6.06 (LTS) “Dapper Drake” (amd64). The reason I happened upon choosing Dapper Drake as my installation choice was that I had already burned the live CD and had it on hand when I needed to install it. Had I done things a little differently and actually researched things a little more, I would have avoided the 64 bit installation entirely.

While I do happen to have an AMD64 processor, the software available for desktops in the 64 bit repository is, rather lacking compared to the robust i386 (32 bit) alternatives. It was really difficult to track down that perfect piece of software I needed only to find out I had to jump through 10 more hoops to get it installed correctly. Things that required reading a series of howtos and required adding lots of third party untested and possibly untrustworthy software was getting on my nerves.

I found out that there is no direct upgrade path to allow you to skip version numbers of Ubuntu releases. The newest release of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, will be released later next month. This means I’d have to first install “Edgy Eft”, the release between “Dapper Drake” and “Feisty Fawn”. Seeing as I’d have to upgrade once, and I didn’t want to run a beta pre-release operating system (Feisty Fawn), I decided to install Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” i386 (32 bit) instead. I went about researching the best way to do this.

It turns out, Edgy Eft was released with lots of problems for people trying to upgrade from Dapper Drake. According to significant number of threads, the overwhelming opinion of people upgrading to Edgy Eft recommended doing a fresh install, rather than trying to upgrade an already installed system. Since I had a lot of spare CDs after backing up my system a few weeks ago, I decided to make the plunge and simply cut my losses on the amd64 install of Dapper Drake. It had been a good learning experience, but I was off to greener pastures.

What a difference it’s made!

Now that I am a little more comfortable with Linux, I got back up to speed in little more than a few hours than a few days. Here is how the install went. I popped in the install CD, answered the questions, then went to walk my dog. But the time I returned, I had a system ready to use. It can’t get any easier.

Of course, I “cheated” a little bit by using Automatix2. My eyes almost popped out of my head when I actually had choices of software to install that didn’t require running around trying to get 32 bit applications running on a 64 bit machine. I went to a site with Flash in Firefox, clicked the “plugin needed” message, and it actually installed like it was supposed to do! “It just worked.” That problem took me a week of looking for workarounds and fidgeting with things before I could get working before on the Dapper Drake amd64 install. I won’t be going back to 64 bit architecture until software support catches up.

I’m currently enamored with my new Edgy desktop. Because the respositories for Edgy a little more updated than Dapper, I was able to get Shoutcast video support working without even having to look at a howto. “It just worked.” Now I can watch streaming videos like I did under Windows just as easily as in Windows.

I’m back up to speed with Edgy, and haven’t even tried to do anything exclusive to this release yet. Tomboy notes looks like a sticky note program on awesome steroids. (Not the gross kind that cause acne, the awesome kind that cause geeky coolnes.) Keeping good ideas around for a post is always good when a case of writer’s block comes along.

My only standing issue is trying to get “easyh10” to work. Amarok, the music player I use supports this plugin to mount and then write the database for my wife’s mp3 player, but it requires a host of KDE dependencies that I don’t have installed. I really don’t want to run the entire KDE desktop (awesome though it may be) just to get an Amarok plugin working. Either I dive into the Command Line Interface (CLI) to get it working, or put up with dual booting Windows since I’ve got the same program working perfectly with a Graphical Interface (GUI) in that Operating System. If anyone finds me a Linux GUI for that application, I’d very much appreciate it.

I’ve got Winff, a (GUI) video conversion program installed (Huzzah!) however, it doesn’t do any converting  at the moment (Awww.). I’ll have to figure out what’s going on in the configuration that I did wrong. Someone also posted a D2 profile over at iAudiophile that is said to work with iriverter. I’ve tried to get that working in Linux as well, but didn’t have any luck yet.

Right now, I’m an excited to be using a fully featured OS that has applications I need once again.

technorati tags:linux, Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Update, Upgrade, Amd64, i386, amarok, easyh10