Finally made the jump!

Moley · 8 Aug 2011 at 12:18

I've had a great time this weekend rebuilding my pc and dumping windows 7. I've been playing with Ubuntu and BT5 for some weeks in virtual machines and after spending last week backing up everything I need from windows onto my external storage I finally bit the bullet and rebuilt my computer on BT5 distro.

Firstly I backed everything onto my nas - WD MBWE - which then promptly died, however the hard drive was still usable and as it has an ext3 filesystem was ideal for using under linux again.

Wiped my old hard disks and setup my 3x500GB drives as a raid0 array - took sometime (and learning) to get BT5 to recognise and use the array though.

Installed BT5, mounted old nas drive, mounted external usbs, installed nVidia drivers and configured multiple screen support, installed Chrome, Virtualbox (needed Win7 for Outlook 2010), installed Pokerstars client on Wine, installed World of Warcraft on Wine, setup email, setup LibreOffice, setup VLC.

Have a job ahead of me now to arrange my old data back onto the new system and just getting used to everything to do with using a new OS, but damn this is fun!

Very glad I made the jump, looking forward to calling myself a Linux expert at some time in the not-too-distant future.

Moley · 8 Aug 2011 at 14:40

I have it on my laptop too - I work in IT Security so need to get as familiar with it as possible, so I'm using it as my day-to-day install. When I'm happy I may well switch to another main distribution.

Moley · 8 Aug 2011 at 22:35

I've used outlook for ages - it's our corporate mail program of choice. However I have loaded Evolution and trying it out for a few days. Can't stand Thunderbird, will take a look at Kontact like you suggested.

Thanks.

Moley · 10 Aug 2011 at 11:14

Well that's just typical isn't it? Last night one of the drives in my raid0 array dropped out of the array (BIOS created) and I couldn't see where to put it back in in the P35-DSR3 screens. So I had to rebuild the machine again!

I've taken advice however and put Ubuntu on instead of BT5 and I'm using software raid instead of hardware raid. I've also turned off Unity and using normal KDE - this is actually quite nice.