Praxis

So, after a month or two of evaluation, what operating system(s) do I actually use?

• Wife and daughter: Windows Vista SP 1


• Yours truly: Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

Everyone here uses Open Office, Firefox and Gimp.

I'm using the Gnome desktop. I installed and considered switching to KDE, but I don't see much reason to climb another learning curve just to get "here" again. It doesn't add much, and it drives the Synaptic Package Manager bananas to keep two separate lines of dependencies clear and clean (e.g., two separate and incompatible screensaver managers, with no obvious way to remove either). So, there's no rush here to commit to KDE.

That said, the stuff that runs under Ubuntu, especially the stuff that can run under Ubuntu (and that Ubuntu doesn't necessarily support, such as JRE, etc.) is subject to the same sort of fits, starts, glitches, lockups, fizzing whizbangs and outright crashes that used to plague Macintosh before they switched to OS X 10.5, or Microsoft before Vista SP 1. Ubuntu is not perfect, but if you don't knock your own ball into the woods, for the most part things go about as well as could be expected.

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One thing I do differently, I downloaded and installed Apache 2.28 directly from the Apache ftp site, reason being, Synaptic Package Manager and I together somehow munged the "approved" Debian package to the point where it could not install, reinstall, clean up or run. Maybe it could, but at Witt's End, I tend to fray my tether (from all the gnawing and gnashing) and do things the easy way. That is, ./configure --prefix=/usr/local ; make ; make install and the hell with it. Right now, all my configuration files work, and all that "easy" Debian religion has been swept off my system with all the other vestigial mistletoe and residual Druidisms. So there. [Update: Found /etc/rc.local, too! So, ha! It works!]