About a year ago I found I was doing much more server admin tasks and these were all using Linux servers. I’d inherited the job of server admin when someone left the team I was working in at the time and an executive decision was made to put me in charge of them. I have no great idea why, though suspect that desperation played a part. CentOS. And not just CentOS (I did grow to dislike it greatly) but some version that was so old it was unsupported. It was not a fun time.
But it did make me brush off my Linux skills, and that wasn’t a bad thing. I had played with Linux very occasionally since an early RedHat installation I tried a fair few years ago. Probably about 12 years ago, but maybe a bit less. I did get quite into the idea and remember reading through some sort of Linux Bible that was basically manpages in print form. But some of it stuck. The use of RedHat, however, did not stick. I didn’t find it useful enough to keep as my main desktop and remained with varying versions of Windows for about the next, er, 12 years.
So this started to be restricted when I was writing bash scripts to do server-y things, and I started to look at, and eventually installed, Cygnix. I also considered coLinux and something similar, but didn’t actually go down that route.
After a couple of weeks of Cygnix, I downloaded a liveCD for Ubuntu 10.10 and installed Wubi. It does annoy me when people on #ubuntu decry Wubi. I believe it’s perfectly adequate for people to get a taster of Ubuntu. But I would say that – I was one of the people who got the taste and ended up moving on to a full installation dual booting with Windows.
I kept Windows for a while. Mainly it got used for Dragon Naturally Speaking and I think I had a game or two on there. But after a while it was being used less and less and one day, the disk space was assimilated to the borgness that my Ubuntu install had become. I had Apache, PHP and mySQL working fine, and had been experimenting with a variety of editors and IDEs before settling on Netbeans. I had Eclipse for a while to support some Java code developed by the rest of the team which I sometimes had to edit, and though I tried developing PHP on it, I preferred Netbeans.
Simple as that. I’d ended using Linux as my desktop.
0 Comments.