daverea.com

Since I wrote a few weeks ago about updating the OS on my home PC, I figured a follow-up is in order.

Sometime around the middle of August, I installed Ubuntu Linux 6.06LTS on “liberty”, one of my twin Dell 4550s. Since this was my first experience with Ubuntu, I opted to stick with most of the defaults for the install, altering only the hard drive settings (to preserve the contents of my existing Gentoo drive).

So far, the experience has been fantastic. Just about everything “Just Worked” right out of the box. Anything that didn’t was quickly solved by installing the right packages – and the package repositories are nearly as extensive as Gentoo’s. Any speed hit that I might have taken by using pre-compiled binaries is easily offset by the fact that I can sync my Palm Pilot again, and any guilt I felt over considering abandoning one of the most “purist” Linux distros was quickly overcome when Pandora (my very favorite online music service) worked from Firefox without any moaning or gnashing of configuration files!

Now, in the spirit of geeky experimentation and computational out-on-a-limbedness that seems to have gripped me, I’ve installed Ion, which is a piece of Linux software called a window manager. On whatever OS you’re using, the window manager (or WM for short) is the code that arranges your windows on your screen, sets up your menus and more or less defines the “look and feel” of your PC. If the WM for Microsoft Windows is a lumbering but cool-looking limo-bus, and the WM for Mac OS-X is a sexy-looing future-car, then Ion is all the simplicity of a commuter train crammed into a package about the size of a Yugo.

There are no menus, no start button, no task bar, no system tray – pretty much no anything except for a svelt gray stripe across the top of the screen. On it are arranged the titles of all the programs you have running. Every program runs full-screen, so there are no overlapping windows and you never play the minimize/maximize/re-arrange game trying to bring what you’re interested in to the front of the screen. Meanwhile, anything you would normally use menus to access (such as launching a program or getting information about your system) is handled with keystrokes in Ion.

While I’m not sure about welcoming Ion into our home quite yet, I know Ubuntu is here to stay. Sorry, Gentoo: compiling and configuring my OS from scratch was fun for a while, but there are more important things in life now than watching gcc messages float by as I contemplate my 133tness…