Now that I’m getting more serious about switching to Linux, I had to come up with a good strategy for sharing data between Linux and Windows. I still need Windows XP for games, and potentially for a few other applications, so I’m not quite ready to give it up completely. Unfortunately, sharing data between the two operating systems still isn’t trivial. The first problem is that Linux still does not support writing to NTFS partitions....
I ran into another FAT32 limitation yesterday: I had completely forgotten that the maximum file tsize in FAT32 is 4GB. Or more likely, it simply wasn’t an issue back when I was using FAT32 the last time. Unfortunately, it is much more of an issue now. I frequently burn DVDs, and as a regular DVD can be up to 4.7GB, I sometimes need to deal with 4.7GB ISO files on my hard drives....
I have spent a significant portion of last week installing, configuring, and exploring Gentoo Linux on my desktop at home. I have used Linux on and off over the past 9 years or so, starting with an early Suse distribution (long before there was a graphical installer). Most of my recent Linux experience has been on Redhat, and at my new job we use Redhat Enterprise 3.0 on our workstations. The fact that we use Linux at my job has sparked a renewed interest in Linux, while at the same time causing some minor frustrations. Many of these are due to the package management. Overall, I think that Redhat has done a decent job with RPM, which allows for a relatively easy way to install and manage packages and dependencies. But when trying to get a particular feature working (such as Bluetooth), this often leads to a wild goose chase to download all the necessary RPM, the dependent RPMs, etc. In case of Bluetooth, I would have had to install Gnome, which again would have required upgrading to the xorg (rather than XFree86) X server, as the updated Gnome RPM packages are only available for the newer Fedora distribution, which has (like most current distros) switched to xorg. At that point I gave up and decided to pursue this again some time in the future… Particularly in a corporate environment, goose chases like that are not very desirable, as our sys admins (who are ultimately responsible for maintaining and upgrading our systems) want to maintain a reasonably standard workstation configuration. They use the apt tools to manage packages and push updates to our systems, which is definitely a step up from RPM. Anyway, I’m getting off track, as I really wanted to write about Gentoo. I was recently forced to upgrade my personal desktop due to a motherboard failure, and I ended up upgrading to an Athlon64 processor. I figured that this would be a good opportunity to install a recent Linux distribution with AMD64 support. Fedore Core 3 first came to my mind, but I felt like trying out something new and different and decided to give Gentoo Linux a try. ...
In one of my previous postings, I hinted at some of the issues I initially had with the Linux workstation at my new job (we use Redhat Enterprise 3.0). The UI was very sluggish, the memory usage high, I was unable to get Bluetooth support working, etc. Some of these issues have been resolved in the mean time, at least for the time being. Our home directories are on a network share, which adds significant overhead with desktop environments like Gnome that frequently need to access dot files in the user’s home directory....
At my new job, development is done on Linux workstations. In many ways this is great, as I enjoy the power of Unix. Unfortunately, the experience has not nearly been as smooth as I would have hoped… ...