Full Circle Magazine FR

I’m almost 50 and my professional curriculum is solely as Supply Chain and Production manager. Currently, I'm plant director for a food company. I'm neither an IT professional nor a smart young digital native. My experience might be interesting for others who are interested in nature, not young any more, and interested in Linux, but might be worried to attempt something new. I became familiar with Linux for the first time about 30 years ago. At the time, I was a university student. My very first access to a computer was on a microcomputer running Unix; text mode only of course. Counting my university term (5 years) and my 15 months of service as an officer for the military navy–they were using Unix too–I've being using Windows PC or AS400. At the beginning of 2000, I ran into an issue I was not able to solve on my PC, which was running the unlucky Windows Millenium. The office suite MS Works stopped running and I could not find a solution. Looking for an alternative to MS Works, I discovered open source software by downloading the OpenOffice suite. I was strongly impressed by that office suite. It was so much better than Works and it was free.

At more or less at the same time, an IT advisor working for my company gave me a Knoppix live CD. It was a very nice and rich in functionalities. Nevertheless I was not capable of solving problems I had in setting up an internet connection via winmodem. I continued discovering and using open source software and tools like Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Hugin became my standard home computing tools, but I was still a Windows user. A few months ago, after the last antivirus update and the last consequent performance reduction of my notebook, a Lenovo Thinkpad T43, Pentium M, 2.13 GHz, 2 GB Ram, running Windows XP, I decided to test some Linux distros, because I read on the internet that most of them just work on notebooks and were able to boost old hardware performance. I downloaded a free guide from Makeuseof.com indicating Ubuntu was a good solution for renewing old hardware. I started from that interesting guide where I found my very first piece of information. Another very good source was Distrowatch (www.distrowatch.com) where I have studied the reviews of the distros which were tested.

I took the time to use Unetbootin and to test live distros booting from a usb pendrive including: all the 4 flavours of Ubuntu family (Gnome wasn't still official), Mint 14 Cinnamon and Mate, Fedora 18 Xfce, Debian 6 Gnome, Mageia 2, Fuduntu, Bodhi Linux. My test was: • Live run with full hardware recognition. • The readiness of setting up a mobile broadband connection–the only way I have to connect to the web. • The performance of my notebook. • The appeal of the desktop. After this first selection, I chose Xubuntu 12.10, Bodhi 2.3, Mint 14 Mate and Ubuntu 12.04. I was not convinced by Lubuntu, even if it was really light and therefore fast on my pc, because there is no LTS version and I did not find a compelling explanation of this difference with the other three *buntus. Bodhi is a rolling distribution, for sure not the best for a newbie, but the distro website has very good documentation and this convinced me. I took Parted Magic–in my opinion really a wizard distribution–and I made room on my hard disk for testing the four distros, installing them alongside Windows XP. I resized the Windows XP partition, setting up a new swap and a new empty partition for the new system.

First test was Ubuntu 12.04. It has a very easy installation process, but it is a bit resource consuming and it slowed down my PC. The software that came with the standard installation was older than the versions I was using on Windows XP. After some updates from ppa, I decided that I preferred some system stability issues in return for the availability of newer software versions. I have tested VirtualBox and I hae set up a Windows XP virtual machine. By the way, after the unavoidable very first confusion of being a long-term Windows user, I liked Unity DE. Second was Mint 14 Mate. It had the same easy installation as Ubuntu, very nice look, very easy to use for a long-time Windows user like me, but still a bit heavy on my slow hardware. I have been using this distro for a week and I never rebooted XP. Instead, I installed Virtual Box and used the VM I made during Ubuntu 12.04 testing. Third was Bodhi Linux. Something went wrong during the installation. My system halted after the interactive part of the installation and I was not able to complete the process. I abandoned this distro. It was fast and nice. As soon as I am more experienced I will try it again. Fourth was Xubuntu 12.10. It has the same easy installation process as Ubuntu 12.04. It is comfortable to use for a newbie like me and runs fast on my notebook. In my opinion, it does not have much eye candy, but it looks elegant. There are only a few software packages with the standard installation, but the Ubuntu software collection is the largest in the Linux world. Conclusion: Xubuntu 12.10 is my choice.

After the installation and the updating, I installed Ubuntu-restricted-extras, Calibre and FBReader (ebook manager and reader), Gimp 2.8, LibreOffice 4.0, Hugin (panorama picture composer) and Luminance HDR (HDRI photo tool), VirtualBox, VLC (media player), Vuze (bit-torrent client),Wammu (managing tool for the broadband mobile modem), Wine from the Ubuntu software repository or from the official ppa or from the web and then by GDebi of each package. I have updated the file manager Thunar to the 1.6 version because of the nice tabbing feature missing in the older version installed is standard. I made a few aesthetic modifications to the icons, the fonts and the system bar. There are only two minor issues I was not able to overcome in a pure Linux way with my Xubuntu installation. Because of my iPad and Kobo, I have set up a Virtualbox virtual machine running Windows XP. Kobo: Calibre, a very efficient ebook manager, works smoothly with my Kobo, but if I want to update the firmware, I need the specific Kobosetup software, and I was not able both to setup the unofficial Linux release of it, and to run the Windows version of it under Wine. At present, I have installed the Windows version of Kobosetup in the XP virtual machine. Another way to get a solution is to find a wifi spot and upgrade the firmware via wifi, but my PC wifi card does not support wifi access point.

iPad: I have no problem if I want to access the apps repositories; Gigolo does an excellent job and I see my iPad directories in Thunar. But, if I want to access the standard Music, Video and Picture repositories on iPad, I see them as if the titles of the songs or video or picture were encrypted and if I want to update the iPad OS I need iTunes – that runs decently only under Windows or Mac OSx. At present I have no idea on how to have complete control of my iPad without iTunes, therefore iTunes is installed in the XP virtual machine. Workarounds: for the OS updating, I should find a wifi hot spot; for the standard repository access I should test the tools available for iPod. My PC looks like new. It starts up fast, it runs fast, and it is affordable. After more than a week of testing, the system is now stable and I'm feeling comfortable in my home daily working. This is the beginning of a new era of learning and experimenting for me. I have a lot of things to learn about Linux. I am planning to test Lubuntu, because, during the tests mentioned above, I realized that my way of using a PC and software does not need ‘long term support’ (for my use I just need the back-up of my data), and soon I will be back again testing Bodhi.