The learning curve

Less than a week in. Am I enjoying it? Not a bit of it.

First of all, and perhaps most significantly, I can't connect to the wireless network in college and I've been told that with Ubuntu I categorically can't. No way, no how. Bloody brilliant that is, doesn't make me miss windows at all.

To move away from that (and let's face it, it says more about the Trinity College IT staff than anything else) I have had some little moments of joy. After fiddling about with NVidia drivers I did eventually get my monitor to native resolution, and on mature reflection it was actually not all that difficult a process. Unfortunately that success has been more or less completely cancelled out by the fact that dual-monitor support is hopeless, absolutely hopeless. It works fine if you want to span your display across two equally sized screens, but who wants that? I want two seperate, self-contained monitors, thank you very much, or at the very least I want that option. Even worse is the fact that not only does a window span both screens when you maximize it, but because of the difference in resolution between the two screens you actually don't even see the bottom or top of part of the window depending on how you have the monitors physically positioned. In effect there's a box drawn from the bottom-left to the top-right, and that's your display. Never mind that not all of that is actually displayable on the given monitor configuration. As I say, hopeless.

There are other good points though. I've been impressed by the add/remove programs feature, which allows you to more or less effortlessly find and install just about whatever free Linux compatible softeware you like. In fact, if I do return to Windows I'm rather going to miss that feature. I'll also miss the workspaces feature, which I'm sure is available in some form for Windows but which is integrated and just works nicley on Ubuntu. You press control-alt left, or whatever direction, and you can switch between whatever number of workspaces you like. I think OS X may already have this, I'll have to check that out. See screenshot for a semi-descriptive image. Also did I mention that I quite like the default desktop? That's what the image at the top is - I do want to draw attention to as many positives as possible...

I do still have a lot left to discover about Ubuntu, and I do think it has a lot to offer. I haven't tried WINE yet, which will be a big test, and I was handed the name of an appareantly very cool app of some description in College the other day. The name of the app escapes me, but I'll talk about it a little more the next day. Also, I haven't given up hope of getting connected to the college wireless network, so I'll post back on that, and there must be a better way of setting up dual-monitors, which I'll also get on. The journey has only just begun.