dude, you gotta let it go

Well I'm finally going to give up the Gateway ghost. I thought remorse was bad when we lost a cat. But a good friend of mine, an IT specialist, recycled toward me a used laptop in a business upgrade. A Dell with descent specs and 4 gig of ram from the XP era 2007. Yeah it is not spanking brand new but descent is the keyword. As per agreement I reformatted the drive to remove XP and company data, installed Fedora 16, even while we speak, er a write or type. I feel all fuzzy and excited.

The first thing was to Google 'Linux on laptops' to get the opinion of many who have had experience with Linux on this make of laptop, a Dell M90. There were some video concerns but no real gotchas so far. We just gone from the bargain basement to the upper mid levels as this is a workstation. Red Hat has been a staple in the engineering field for years. Fedora is the cutting-edge for Red Hat but does not stray from the rock solid reputation. This visit is to reacquaint myself with Fedora and to get experience with another style of Linux. Actually the only reason I went to the Debian camp was because they had all the applications I wanted without hassles. Part of the whole user friendlier scene is to make application finding and installing better. I think Red Hat lagged on that front for a long time, now it's up to snuff.

I can't make a fair comparison between my old laptop and the new because the old laptop had a 1024x768 screen. The newer one 1920x1200 and the new Ubuntu and Fedora takes advantage of the expanded real estate. For instance in GIMP, overlapping windows on the old 1924 wide screen, descent size work space and dialog boxes on the 1920 wide screen. Then the amount of system RAM, 512mb vs 4gig, and also the larger video RAM makes for better performance. And best of all is my old Wacom Graphire2 tablet which jittered on the old, is rock steady on the new. 

So now in the works is a new studio work strategy, if this new laptop proves it's worth. My desktop has Xubuntu 11.10 and the laptop Fedora 16 with Gnome Shell. All is sweetness and light here in the Linuxville Guide Chateau and the Glad new car smell candle is in the air. Now if I can use the wireless without effecting the TV in the livingroom my wife won't have to call me down from the mancave.

I give you the lowdown like this because many of us creative types can't wait to get all the latest new hardware and professional software. Making art while making due is what we often have to do. When and if we make the cut..........but until then, let's get on with it, now. Stay tuned.