Making the switch

I love the GNU and Linux philosophy. I love the command-line. Yet, I’m still running Windows Vista.

I’ve tried, honestly. A few days before last year’s Biton LAN Party, I decided to switch to Ubuntu. I liked it at first, but then things started to piss me off: I couldn’t find a proper replacement for Visual Studio, Wine failed to produce any sound, and as soon as I wanted something slightly different, something in Ubuntu would fail. After a day at the LAN without any gaming done, I gave up an just booted to Vista. After all, what’s a LAN party without games ?

At least 6 months have passed since then, and I still long for a Linux desktop. My recent adventures with setting up a MythBuntu server at home and playing around with an ArchLinux Gaming LiveDVD have only made that longing stronger. So I’ve decided that once I’m back in the Netherlands, I’m going to give it another try. And this time slightly more prepared.

So I’ve taken the time to make a little list stating things I should investigate before making the plunge, and I’ll try to tackle them one at a time later on. So here goes:

  • Which distribution? Ubuntu sounds simple, but once you start messing in the configuration it breaks horribly. And there are so many around nowadays, why not look a bit further?
  • KDE or Gnome? or even XFCE?
  • What apps do I rely on, and what are their Linux counterparts?
  • If counterparts are not available for a specific app, will it work under Wine or a VM ?
  • My hardware should all work (especially my networked HP Laserjet 4000 printer, which was failing last time in Ubuntu)
For now, that’s all I can think of. I’ll try to maintain that todo list, and occasionally post about some of the things I found out.

Introduction

Hi,

If you’re reading this, chances are that you probably already know me. However, for the occasional passer-by that came in through google, here’s a quick introduction.

As of writing this, I am a 21 year old computer programmer. Still busy with my Computer Science study at Utrecht University, although currently I am having a small (5 months) break from my studies and am working for a Parisian company called “Iminent“.

As my study has probably already suggested, I have a passion for programming, and am especially challenged by algorithmic contests like the NWERC (and all related contests like the UKP, BAPC). I also have a deep passion for finding out “how things work”, and as thoroughly enjoy the act of reverse engineering.

Of all the progamming languages I know, I enjoy working in C++ and x86 Assembly the most.

Currently my best known work is an add-on for Windows Live Messenger named StuffPlug, that targets it’s (what I experience as) shortcomings and glitches, and apparently even today it’s downloaded several thousand times per day. Apart from that, I also enjoy working on numerous smaller projects, but they’re too many to all list here.

This blog will be a place for me to share technical stories, challenges, examples, or anything else technical I feel should be public. Oh, and the occasional rambling, probably.

If there is anything I failed to mention in this introductory post, please let me know through a comment. At this time I have comments restricted to registered users to prevent comment-spam, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to register at all. In the future I might opt for guest-posting with a filter to comment-spam…