I moved my laptop over from the It Just Works (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) operating system to the It (mostly) just works system. I don’t mean this as a derogatory statement, I’ve been using linux since the Redhat 5 series and it’s been the only OS on my desktop workstation for the last 4 years, and it’s a far superior operating system in many ways that matter to me. But really you can very rarely say that it all ‘just works’. I have to admit that it’s close though. Very close. Read on for the few problems I did have.

The biggest problems holding me back from the move have slowly evaporated over the past few months. The drivers for the broadcom wired port are now standard in recent kernels. The memory hack for the video bios on this video chipset is no longer necessary as xorg supports it out of the box. The Intel 2200B/G wireless card now has workable open-source drivers, and the power-management support in the more recent head-covering (hat,fedora) style distros is getting pretty darn good. I did have to make one minor adjustment and the network was up and working better than it ever was in windows. One of my biggest complaints about XP’s network configuration settings is that you have to manually change whenever you switch networks. If I want to use different static IPs depending on which network I’m on, or dhcp here, and static there, there is no easy way to do it. Linux’s power is such that it’s always been possible to script together easy network switching. It’s that kind of architecture that makes putting a pretty and easy to use GUI on top of it quite convienant. The network profile support is one of my favorite features.

Another obstacle that nearly was enough to send me back (*shudder*) to windows was palm sync’ing. I’ve done it myself many times before and I didn’t expect too much of a problem, but some recent changes in the pilot-link libraries required tweaking some configs a bit to allow easy palm syncs (creating the right udev settings to map /dev/pilot to the appropriate device and making sure to use /dev/ttyUSB0 and not /dev/ttyUSB1 — it depends on which Palm you have which you’re supposed to use. I guess the easiest way to find out which is to try [or search the pilot-link site for docs] it yourself).

When I don’t sleep much, my writing sucks. Badly.

And don’t even get me started on bluetooth sync’ing. There’s apparently no way to use gnome-pilot to sync to evolution using a bluetooth serial link, you have to configure a full ppp network interface which I really didn’t feel like mucking with. So for now, it’s usb only sync’ing, but at least it’s working.

Almost. See, Evolution still (for four years running) doesn’t support category syncing. While I really only use two categories (personal/business), it’s quite annoying having to make changes in two places if I want the category to be usable.

What does ‘just work’ for me though includes:

• network profiles (no can do on windows)
• sound
• video
• network printing (easier than windows to set up)
• all of my favorite firefox extensions
• cd burner
• wired network
• automatically detecting inserting digital camera CF cards and importing the photos
• Even cooler; automatically detecting the digital camera usb connection and importing the photos (not just from a CF reader with media on it) [Added 04/30/05]

And I’m sure there are lots more I haven’t even discovered yet.

Posted by Jordan on Tuesday, April 26th, 2005 at 4:00 pm.