After a hectic schedule, I decided to give myself a break. So I decided that I will install Linux just for fun to refresh my memory on the linux front. It is also a small bet with my colleague that I could be productive and have fun with Linux just the way I work with Windows. I was arguing on the fact that there is no better learning platform than Linux. I've worked only on RedHat 7,8,9 distros that are distributed with magazines. There is this old joke about Open Source communities vs. Closed source vendors . It goes something like this. "Commercial vendors sell software but give away free T-Shirts. Open source communities give free software but sell T-Shirts."
So, here I am blogging from my linux (yeah!!!) machine. It has been a long time since I had worked on any of the linux distros. I tried downloading Fedora, but it was just too big. So is Novell Desktop Linux. I've got the bandwidth and everything but shelling so much space for it from my hard disk did not seem worth it. Who needs so much stuff anyway. So I settled for Ubuntu. Ubuntu still retains the open source passion that makes it attractive. The installation was lightweight and text based which suits me. I do not want any fancy graphics for the installation. Ubuntu installed GNOME by default and to my surprise had disabled the root account. I first felt a little uncomfortable running as a non-privileged user. We've all got used to running as administrator on our windows machines. People would laugh if you said you did not have administrative privileges on a Windows Machine. But on a linux machine it is normal that you are a restricted user. Everytime I used Nautilus to copy files I was reminded that I was running under a non-privileged user login. Although I could launch Nautilus itself with sudo, I used the command line. I still remembered basic linux commands. That was quite a relief.
Unfortunately, I was not able to listen to LaunchCast and I miss my MSN Radio already. :-( Apart from that I am pretty happy with the distribution. It seems to be pretty stable. I have installed (rather extracted) Eclipse, the latest Java Runtime and the pydev Eclipse plugin. It is a pretty neat. If time permits, I will try to write a small sudoku puzzle solver in Python on my Linux machine. And finally, just for the pure visual treat and to prove that everything is working, here is the screenshot of my desktop.
