Ubuntu at home : week 1
A quick update on the Ubuntu Experiment at home. Things have went well, after installing the mediabuntu extensions, mp3's, flash video websites, and other media now works great. Lynne has discovered several games on it that she likes and installed. one major downfall is that it's NOT readily apparent how to get the Nvidia non-free drivers installed so that 3d acceleration works. It's a simple task but took 1 hour of googling to get the real answer among the hundreds of convoluted solutions. out there. Honestly, Ubuntu needs to swallow their pride and make a simple "click me to install Nvidia non free drivers" button on the desktop right after installation.
My own experimenting has uncovered several apps that install easily. I'm ripping DVD's to mpeg 4 files without effort as Handbrake is a no-brainier install (it does require you to install VLC to work, something that is not mentioned on their website where the download is.) Ripping CD's to mp3 is going good and even ripping Last.fm streams are working.. (I'm a ripper by nature) The old Pentium 4 3.0gig processor plays back a 720p Mpeg 4 decently to my surprise.
I even found a cool DJ program called Mixxx that replaces my VirtualDJ software package from years ago.
The Printers in the house are all working good without driver installs. I'm still trying to get the Artisan 810 scanner to work, but that is a smaller issue as you can walk up to the unit and scan to a thumb drive. The biggest problem is getting her iPod connected and syncing. The biggest problem I have is that nothing on linux replicates apple's software. She wants her pod-casts to automatically sync and delete the ones she heard. Everything linux treats the ipod as a usb storage device... Great for me, bad for the wife. she wants automatic.
My own experimenting has uncovered several apps that install easily. I'm ripping DVD's to mpeg 4 files without effort as Handbrake is a no-brainier install (it does require you to install VLC to work, something that is not mentioned on their website where the download is.) Ripping CD's to mp3 is going good and even ripping Last.fm streams are working.. (I'm a ripper by nature) The old Pentium 4 3.0gig processor plays back a 720p Mpeg 4 decently to my surprise.
I even found a cool DJ program called Mixxx that replaces my VirtualDJ software package from years ago.
The Printers in the house are all working good without driver installs. I'm still trying to get the Artisan 810 scanner to work, but that is a smaller issue as you can walk up to the unit and scan to a thumb drive. The biggest problem is getting her iPod connected and syncing. The biggest problem I have is that nothing on linux replicates apple's software. She wants her pod-casts to automatically sync and delete the ones she heard. Everything linux treats the ipod as a usb storage device... Great for me, bad for the wife. she wants automatic.
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