Today is the official launch of Windows 7 and the media coverage is surprisingly low key. From all the positive reviews it sounds like Windows 7 will do well. Microsoft seems to have removed or toned down the most annoying features of Vista; perhaps many businesses will finally take the plunge and upgrade from XP! But not me! I am going to go the Ubuntu Linux route.
I have installed various versions of Linux, Solaris, and BSD over the last 10+ years, but I have never stuck with any Windows alternative for very long. There were always installation problems, hardware driver problems, or data sharing problems, that is, until I installed Ubuntu.
My current home office computer, which does double duty as my wife’s computer, is getting a little tired. While it is not state of the art, it does have an Nvidia AGP card with dual 22” LCDs, a Firewire card for my video camera, and a one year old HP all-in-one printer/scanner/fax. When XP needed to be reinstalled earlier this year due to Windows rot, I partitioned the hard drive to make it easy to dual boot. I reinstalled XP and then Ubuntu.
Having read several recent reviews I must admit I was expecting a lot from Ubuntu, and it did not disappoint! It found my XP installation and offered to map My Documents for easy access. Very cool! And ALL my hardware was recognized, even the scanner and fax on the all-in-one. To enable full hardware accelerated dual head support I did need to install a closed source video driver, but it was painless with the package manager.
My wife loves card and board games, so I installed a variety of those to help introduce her to our new OS. She took right to it, and in no time had OpenOffice fired up editing a Word document on the XP partition. Firefox was easy since we already used that on XP.
I am getting ready to build a new home office computer. It will have a quad core CPU with 2×2GB of RAM to start, but I plan to add another 2×4GB next year for a total of 12GB when the 4GB modules drop in price. I plan to make use of the quad cores and all that RAM because I will no longer multi-boot; I am switching to virtualization.
I will be installing the 64bit version of Ubuntu as the only booting OS. I will attempt to use Wine for any Windows apps I must still run, but I will also enable an “XP mode” via VirtualBox. I’ve explained all this to my wife, and she is cool about it as long as she can still play Scrabble and BeJeweled.
VirtualBox will also allow me to virtualize other OSs I may want to test, such as OpenBSD and OpenSolaris. I may even install DOS 6.2 and brush up on my DJGPP programming! Virtualization is the way of the future, and I am looking forward to jumping in with both feet.