From Windows to Linux (Ubuntu)

Here's a list of some applications I wanted to use (and what I found/use now):

• Total Commander with WinRar (works with Wine, and I use Gnome Commander for some similar functionallity. Also Krusader is your other option)
• World of Warcraft (works with Wine, and I use alsa-oss sound wrapper, works better)
• EVE On-line (has self installer under Linux, also works with Wine - or it used to)
• Ventrilo / TeamSpeak (works with Wine + some manual codec copying / native client)
• Fraps (glc-capture is a lot like fraps, there's also recordmydesktop and Istanbul desktop recorder)
  
• Firefox / Thunderbird / OpenOffice.org (all come with Ubuntu, personally I used OOo on Windows, so I have no need for Microsoft Office, but some version can be installed with Wine)
• VirtualDub / some sort of Movie Maker or Pinnacle Studio (Avidemux is ok, but not as strong as VirtualDub, I also use FuocoTools (link2) for conversion frontend / tried Cinerrela and LIVEs for video editing, but mostly they don't work for me and currently I can't find a good one that would. Recently I started using Blender for 3D modeling and animation and has a built-in video editor, but I haven't checked it out yet - so expect a post on this later)
• VMware / VirtualBox (both work fine)
• Nero / Roxio (GnomeBaker, K3B, Brasero - all installable through APT)
• MSN / GoogleTalk / Yahoo / ICQ / ... (Pidgin works great but there are others too)
• Media Player Classic + codecs / Winamp (VLC + Gstreamer codecs from repositores / XMMS - repo here, deb file here)
• Photoshop / Paint Shop Pro (Gimp, GimPhoto - I also tried running Photoshop CS2 with Wine successfully after copying files from Windows installation and applying registry keys, but I don't use it so...)
  
• Some Google applications have installers for Linux (GoogleEarth, Picasa)
  
• Some other applications like local dictionaries, HTML editors (Homesite+, Notepad++) work for me with Wine, but now I mostly look for OpenSource software and try to use that instead. Also commercial applications offer more and more Linux versions.

Apart from that, I wanted TV out with full screen video and I use 2 sound cards, 1 for desktop and 1 for TV set, so that should work aswell. And it does, both ATI and Nvidia have much like in Windows configuration tool to do just that. Sound adapters were configured as its described in the old PDF posted previously.

The beginings of my Ubuntu expirience...

Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu for about a year now and I thought I may post some of my expirience with Linux enviroment to all of you who might be interested in giving it a go.

It's really kind of hard to start now, since I don't know where to begin :) The general idea is for me to use this blog as a tool for keeping all the interesting stuff I learn for future use -and for you to use (if you find it useful, that is).

Why Ubuntu? My first encounter with Linux was way back in 2002 I belive with SuSE Linux 8.0, that just shipped out that year. I was eager enough to buy it -but didn't really use it that much. For me, that was the best distribution prior to Ubuntu. Actually it was preconfigured with Wine and it was capable of running some Windows applications and all the rest was pretty neat too. But that was about it for Linux. I did try to setup some virtual machine's with diffrent distros but nothing was any good for me really.

2007 was full of strange new stuff and we were test drving Windows Vista at work, but the new OS from Microsoft was a disaster. Actually when I started the system my disk was constantly loading, even after shutting down some indexing services as I Googled for help. Eventually we reverted back to XP, but I made a dual boot with Ubuntu 7.04. It was nice, but still I had many issues with it and was not really useful.

2008 started with all my machines dual booting to Ubuntu. I had fixed many many minor issues and there was only little things I was missing from Windows at that point. When you change your operating system enviroment, there really is a need for you to decide which applications are mandatory to have, which are good to have and what are the things you can live without on your computer.

If someone will tell you everything works, well it's not true. While most of the things may work for me, this may not be so for you. There are many custom applications only for Windows, that wont run in Wine and if you can't live without them then you'll either:

• have to try and make them work yourself (lets say some preference tuning, source compiling, etc.)

• find a similar application for Linux

• either virtualize it (run in Virtual machine enviroment) or dual boot it

Well this is about my Linux background, I'm a computer science engineer by profession, but most things are made simple now days and anyone can manage them with the help of Google, reading some documentation and of course experimentig :)