Relatively Painfree
House on Red Corner · 2006-09-18
This weekend I just absolutely had to tweak things up. I have not used OS X on my laptop except for the very very very odd moment when I am just double checking something out of sheer nervousness/frustration. So, I was getting a little peeved that I could not write to the directory with all my music, since it was owned by OS X. Plus, I was beginning to run out of space on my Linux drive and there was all that empty real estate over in Appleville. So, I completely reconfigured my partitions and installed a new version of Ubuntu, to boot!!
Edgy Eft Knot 3 is the latest release of the development branch for Ubuntu. I downloaded a CD image and burned a new disc with the KDE environment - Kubuntu if you are keeping score. Then I took the most profound step of all, I backed up my entire home directory!! Yay! No more lost data! It was really easy, just passed the command:
tar mybackupfile.tar /home
and then BANG!! Forty-five minutes later, I had a neat little 4 GB file to move to the other computer on the network. That took nearly three hours, because I sent it all over WiFi - not the smartest step but I slept while that was happening.
Then I set about configuring my Hard drive, actually, I just stuck the CD in the optical drive and, well it didn’t work right away - I tried to be fancy and was not very successful, so I had to workaround by reinstalling OS X and then tricking the computer into thinking that was going to be the final step. Finally, I got it all loaded up and installed and boy am I impressed!
This is only the third draft of the new Operating system that is due out in October, but boy is it classy! Anti-Aliasing fonts all over the place makes things very pretty, plus easy user control of screen resolution ( who knew that users wanted things easy!) which lets you set things really finely and creates a nice and crisp environment - plus the translucency and drop shadows that were experimental before have become standard so that you do not need to log out of the Xwindows system to use.
Once, I untarred my backup and finished setting up my home directory everything was very nicely done. The only caveat I have is that with this new resolution control, I have to set the fonts for various things at 12 points instead of the default 10, does this mean I am getting old?
Tags: Ubuntu