Sorry for the lack of blogging over the last few days. I've been busy using my normal blogging time setting up Linux on my laptop. I haven't run Linux on my computer for quite a few years (I've used it on and off at work as we use it for some of our servers, but it's not the same). It turned out to be remarkably painless.
I installed Suse 10.1 and KDE for the desktop and most things have worked automatically. It was trivial for it to detect my bluetooth mouse and keyboard (the wheel and extended buttons don't work yet, but I'll get around to fixing that), and they work better than they did on Windows, despite being a Microsoft mouse and keyboard.
Suse easily resizes NTFS partitions during installation, so I can keep my WinXP install around until I've moved everything over. I managed to find a free utility to convert WMAs to MP3s, so my music is all go. It has out of the box integration with Windows networks, so I can still use it at work easily.
Best of all, VMware Server is now free - so I have installed VMware server on Linux, and now have a virtual machine running Windows XP - this handles the few applications (two at last count) that I can't find an acceptable Linux replacement for. At some point I'll try out CrossOver Office to see if I can drop that as well.
So, it all seems to be going well. Unfortunately I can't switch over my work machine yet - the Symphonia suite and Rhapsody Administrator is Windows based, and uses really nasty COM/ATL, which I don't think wine is up to handling yet.
Comments
I've been using Gentoo Linux on one of my PCs and my laptop for a couple of years now. If you want a distro to play around with sometime, I recommend that (especially as you are already familiar with linux). I use linux for a lot of my web programming - looking after MySQL, PHP and Apache on a windows box has proved to be a serious pain...and of course it makes sense to develop in a LAMP environment for LAMP hosting.