Ubuntu - a few days in

3 days of no M$ now. Well almost..

As I mentioned I have a dependency on a couple of things which only seem to work on windoze namely IE7 and GoToMeeting. IE7 I'm not worried about as I will always need to ensure that the work I am responsible for is supported in all the major browsers, so its a good thing I still have access to it. However GoToMeeting is proving a bit harder to solve. I've not come across a Linux equivalent yet. I tried a couple and they were really rubbish.

So problems so far: very few to be honest.

The main issue I have had is getting SSH Tunneling to work. We use this technique to access services on remote machines that have only got the SSH port exposed through the firewalls. This is a very neat and secure means to configure machines. On windoze we use Putty but it doesn't work properly on Ubuntu as it fails to create the tunnels. The built in gSTM tool works very well, but doesn't "keep alive" and has no way to store passwords/key phrases. I'm using it for now, and hope that I can find something that will send "keep alives" as our network connection isn't always brilliant.

Other issues I've had were the display driver is not as good as it could be for my machine and doesn't support dual monitor use. It just clones the display rather than allowing me to spread the desktop across the 2 monitors. Not a big problem but a shame...

Battery management doesn't seem to be as good but there may be other options I've yet to explore.

Other than that everything else is as good if not better than Windoze and I have no regrets yet.

Being able to run a Windows VM is essential tho for me. I really am dependent upon it at the moment. However I now no longer use M$ Office and it's horribly bloaty software packages. That saves a lot of money and time. Now I use Google Docs where possible and for offline work Sun Open Office. Not yet explored whether Google Gears allows me off-line on Ubuntu...