how impressive...

I've been trying to make Ubuntu, Mandriva or Fedora my main desktop OS for a long time but it has not been possible because of one thing wrong or another, usually with my hardware.

But now with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn release on GNOME--it's time to finally switch from Windows to Ubuntu. I'm just completely impressed by how much faster and better it works on my Alienware m5550. Usually, I use the Blackbox window manager and it's even faster than GNOME.

I've had a few hardware issues using Windows XP on my m5550. For some reason, the WiFi just doesn't work right and the configuration buttons don't do what they're advertised to do. I thought that Alienware just hyped up a system. I'd tried updating the BIOS with techsupport on the phone and have never had positive results. I just gave up and lamented my little over-priced notebook with the cool, glowing alienhead on the lid--the reason I bought it.

I still dual-boot to make sure that I really can just rely on Linux now. There are few apps that were written for Windows and still don't run well on Wine. But the office software that Ubuntu comes with, the graphics software, the tools, utilities... Oh, and Beryl!!! I don't need to get Vista anymore.

I'm sure the next release of Ubuntu will completely allow users to replace Windows unless you're using games or similar that "must" be run on Windows.

 

I actually run XP in VMWare when I'm Booted in Ubuntu. So I can use Office 2007, Streets and Trips, Itunes, Live mail Desktop, and some other Apps.


Glad you like Ubuntu.

 

Have you tried SimpleMEPIS 6.5? I've found my sweet spot with that distro.

 

How do you use VMware? I downloaded the player but I guess I need a vmx file? How do you make that?

 

A .vmx file is the image of the operating system. You can't use the player to create an image as far as I know. You'd have to install the vmware server.

But, you can download a vmware image from vmware.com, and run another OS inside of yours. It just won't be Windows.

 

There are other solutions than VMWare. I've used qemu for instance to run XP in Linux. Probably qemu is less user-friendly than VMWare to use but I've never used VMWare so I don't know.

Google is your friend.

 

ON WINDOWS, I install VMware Workstation Evaluation (I think it's 30 or 90 days trial) and with that I can create a vmx file using any OS install disk (like Windows XP install). Once my vmx is created, I can copy it over to my Linux(Ubuntu) partition an use VMWare on Linux.

 

That has to be one of smartest things to do. I'm copying off of you .

 

VMWare Server is also released free now.