Linux Story Goes on..

In the short time I’ve tried Linux I’ve already switched Distros without have really tried any. I’ve started with Ubuntu 6.06, moved to OpenSUSE 10.2 followed by 10.3 and now to LinuxMint Daryna. One thing I liked about all was the look.. though some looked better than others, OpenSUSE did look the best in terms of Icons and that little start bar with the wanimated eye. Compiz was a major deciding factor in moving to OpenSUSE and Multimedia is the reason for moving to LinuxMint (both OpenSUSE 10.3 and LinuxMint have Compiz built in). 

Moving to Linux is something which I cannot consider aat the moment without having a Dualboot for Windows mainly because some devices are still not supported by Linux and others it took me a while to get em working. My wifi experience on LinuxMint was one of those things. I initially had OpenSUSE10.3 but immediatly switched to LinuxMint when I realised that the wifi did not work out-of-the-box in OpenSUSE, however neither did it work in Mint. Which resulted in me tryin another OS install. Note: I don’t know jack bout using the console – if there is something not working, which was working before, I generally reinstall the OS and pray that it works on the next attempt.

So here I was sitting on my brand new Mint only to realise that Wifi was not working, connecting to the net was possible though with the LAN cable (thank god for small favours). So I tried installing drivers from the repository only to realise that it wasn’t working either.

After hunting on the net n Linux forums I came to know bout ndiswrapper (this tool allows you to use your windows driver to get the wifi working under Linux), being the non-console guy I am I immediatly tried using the GUI version of the same, only to find that it was not working properly – answer found on a forum – ndiswrapper GUI is relatively new so it may not work Next I tried ndiswrapper from the console (after copying my wlan driver from their windows location into linux) and hurray .. it worked. So now I had Wifi but still no connection to the repositories.. answer for that was to enter openDNS to the DNS server list… the answer was derived by googling  

After getting these two critical components life is looking a whole lot better on the Linux front. Download whatever you want from synaptic. And windows takes a major trashing in the “Looks” department.. doesn’t matter if its Vista or XP (i mean..who would compare with XP anyway?) . Compiz simply rocks!! There are so many animations available.. I am yet to try out all of em.. but its fun nevertheless.

One area where Windows still rules is Device support, all manufacturers are nice enough to provide drivers for the hardware, not so many are as nice for Linux. I now have to toss my Webcam if I want to use it in Linux – so first check for Linux support before buying the hardware.

 Multimedia support is gud in Mint, it plays most formats out-of-the-box. Of course its still better to download VLC because Mplayer and Totem seem to freeze every now and then (similar to the buffering in Online movies).

Final words, Linux has come a long way but don’t trash your Windows just yet coz u never know wat problems you may encounter (in which case you may need to switch to Win.. and search the forums for answers to your Questions). In the Looks department – which is important to me.. Linux wins hands down.

P.S. does anyone know how to unsplit splitted RAR files? downloaded a movie which has been split into multiple RAR parts which I somehow need to integrate before extracting it. Also if anyone knows how to make a Skype webcam from USRobotics work in Linux please let me know, its model number is USR9640, when plugged into Linux it shows up as 0c45:6242 Microdia which has been classifed as “Unsupported by Linux”. Just some of the unending Linux questions on my road to enlightenment