I have come upon a major hurdle in my migration to Linux. My second hard drive (the one that I use for photographs and music) is formatted as NTFS, which means that I can only mount it as read-only under Linux. This is highly offputting.
One possibility would be to reformat with a more Linux-friendly filesystem (I have everything backed up), but that seems like a very big operation when I am already having doubts about whether Linux is right for me (I can’t get my printer/scanner unit to work at all at the moment, and am not having much success with it).
I’m coming to the conclusion that Linux isn’t right for my needs at this time. Having two separate computers isn’t really an option – I want one computer that can do everything that I need from it. And at this stage, it is looking like the Microsoft way (shudder) provides me with the platform that best allows me to do what I want to do. I’ve currently got a fantastic system for maintaining and utilising my music collection on Windows, and Linux doesn’t seem to work in that context.
This is a sad day, and I’m having great difficulty deciding. I don’t want to dual boot forever, as my bookmarks etc will get gradually out of sync, and I want to be settled in one place. Any thoughts?
February 13, 2005
Deal Breaker?
…and this is the reason I’m still primarily a windows user (at least at home). Well, that and the games thing. There are ways and means of getting around it, http://www.linuxprinting.org/ will tell you how you can get your printer working (if it isn’t a Lexmark), and the FTP Bookmarks Syncroniser Thing will get Firefox (If you use that) to upload your bookmarks to an FTP server (Say, uborka) when you quit, and reload them on startup (So you save them in Windows, then load them in Linux, or vice versa). The problem is that there _isn’t_ a decent local drive format shared by both Windows and Linux (vfat/fat32 doesn’t count, it’s as flakey as all get-out and on modern hard-drives the minimum size of the block is just silly.
There’s a project afoot to put Reiser FS support into the XP Kernel with some kind of driver thing, but that’s deep voodoo and just as read-only as NTFS is for Linux. (Actually, the newer NTFS drivers for Linux do offer read/write access, but you can only swap things around – neither creating, deleting or changing the size of files – so still useless, practically. They’re working on it, though, they’ll probably get it just in time for the legendary WinFS thing to materialize with Windows Longhorn.
In sumary, you might be right, and if Windows is the only thing that really works for you, *shrug* welcome to the club. I’ll get some badges made up, or something.
Linux is just to much effort for me. And I’m a geek. But it’s not a consumer desktop system, and possibly will never be. It’s a server system that has a desktop version for those people familiar with it.
Mac Mini is my answer.
Unfortunately, my printer IS a Lexmark. Sigh.
It’s a shame, because Linux is currently within a hair’s breadth of fulfilling my needs. Which isn’t bad considering that I’ve only been using it for three days – I’ve already managed to overcome a lot of hurdles, so perhaps I can find solutions to those that remain.
I’ve got a nice balance; at home, I use XP Home on my laptop for all my home computing needs. I’ve got a headless Linux box in another room which sits there being a webserver, mail server and general all-round dogsbody machine. It does its job quietly, efficiently and without any fuss.
At work, I’m 100% Linux, which isn’t a problem as games aren’t a huge priority. Mind you, I’d kill for a decent IDE…
I’ve only one thought, for washing the smell of Windows away, and that’s to get a Mac. But that’s not a REAL answer is it?
The Mac Mini did occur to me as an option, but once you add on all the necessary options (802.11, bluetooth, extra memory, new keyboard) it’s not such a good deal. I think I’m going to wait and see if the Linux option improves.
For the meantime, I’m back on Windows.
True, but you don’t necessarily need the BT. And a keyboard is
And I wonder why that is? ;D
Valid point, but I do foresee contributing myself to the mac. But point taken. I do think I would have got one anyway, just probably a bit later in the year. Because it simply is the most functional computer on the market with the lest amount of MS and effort.