I have a bad habit of restlessly installing games and utilities from the web without sometimes knowing what they will do to my system. Installing and uninstalling applications in the Synaptic menu is so easy, sometimes it’s a disservice. “Oh well, I’ll just uninstall it if it sucks and try something else” is my mentality when using Linux these days. It’s really that easy, and it’s encouraged to try something that “works for you”. That’s what freedom is all about.
The problem, oddly, wasn’t FROM Linux being too easy to install, but from Windows games being too easy to install too. I had been using WINE for a little while to play Blizzard games. I’ll get in a phase when I want a really focused RTS experience, but then realize I suck at those games and will uninstall them after a week.
The problem is, installing and uninstalling in WINE isn’t as straightforward as it is in Windows, so I get lots of orphan files sitting around not working anymore. If I uninstall a Linux .deb file, I can check to see if it’s gone, or if the configuration files are still around easily enough. Even when I go digging into WINE’s folder, I still can’t get rid of all the files I need to remove a game from my system. I’m not sure if Uninstalling is unsupported in WINE, or I just don’t know the procedure. (Almost positive it’s the later.).
Anyway, spurred on by a Kubuntu user in the forum, I installed the Kubuntu desktop with Synaptic. It’s literally a few clicks to install an entire desktop environment. No wonder I get in trouble with how easy Linux can be sometimes.
I wanted to check out Kubuntu again, as I hadn’t used it in a while, and KDE is getting a lot of hype these days with their impending KDE 4 release. The install went smoothly, but I realized that I have a lot of duplicate applications in my menus. I got rid of most of the applications I didn’t use, but hit a conflict with media players. The KDE application kaffeine tried to play all my media files, but didn’t display video. Unacceptable. Even uninstalling or removing configuration files didn’t solve the problem.
“Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”
In a move that is probably complete overkill, I backed up all my pressing new material that I wanted to keep. I went ahead and completely redid all the partitioning and reinstalled everything. However, since I had decided I was in this for the long haul, I nuked my Windows partition along with my previous Linux install. Windows free? Almost.
Since I was reinstalling, I’m trying to set up a multiuser environment for the first time. I set up a separate /home partition for our personal files so that I don’t have to lose my own information if I ever need to reinstall windows again. This is highly recommended to do when installing Linux the first time, but with my Windows partition sitting around wasting space I never did it before.
The ultimate goal is to get my wife using Linux on her own. This is not a simple undertaking. My wife isn’t fatally tech allergic, but it might give her a rash from time to time. She doesn’t have any background in computers, so it might actually be easier for her to learn Linux. She doesn’t have to “unlearn” any bad habits like I did.
I went and installed VirtualBox so she can use Internet Explorer to surf Korean websites from within a virtualized Windows XP environment. Since it’s “in a box”, she can’t really break it, and there is no virus threat. I don’t need Internet Explorer on my desktop, so I don’t need to install it twice or fiddle with permissions. Besides setting out a few icons for her to use Openoffice, she’s all set now.
The idea is that I can set up the computer for her so it “just works” without having to worry about her messing up some of the tweaking I like to do. She gets what she needs without the ability to break anything (permissions!), and I get what I need as well. Our files will be separated from each other, so we don’t need to worry about messing with each other’s work.
That’s the idea, at least. I’m not exactly a sysadmin. I got the box back up and running the way it used to (without all the extra applications in the menus) in a few hours. With everything still being “fresh” the system seems a lot more snappy and responsive.
I’m slowly learning keep my finger off that “install” button. If it isn’t in Synaptic, or run as a standalone application, I’m not going to go out of my way to make it work. At least, I won’t this week.
