This weekend I finally decided to take the plunge, by putting in the long pending investment of time and energy and make the final shift to full Linux use.

Ubuntu default installation gives Open Office which I found to be a bit slow for my liking, so I downloaded abiword, gnumeric. Ubuntu repository and installation interface is a pleasure to use. Just select and fire the selection and your software in there. It saves you from even searching for the installation CD. If life was this simple... Next, I thought it is time to listen to some music, But the default music player wont play my collection of music :-( It turned out that Ubuntu do not support the propitery mp3 format; one is supposed to listen to music in Ogg Vorbis format; search for an utility and found a neat piece of software - Audacity to convert to ogg, It actually compressed the file to even smaller than mp3, but I am in no mood to spend time in converting my collection of mp3s; So I decided to install XMMS, another media player that understands mp3. With music in place, it is time for some eye candy, downloaded a few skins for xmms, a splash screen fro boot manager - grub, set the console to trnsparent and shift the menu bar to side with main menu as transparent; I am ready to share my piece of art with you. Took a screen shot, and here - folks my piece of art.

Thank fully gaim is there, which I like as it can handle multiple messsenging protocols. Setting it took 3 min. Now, I am in dilema - should I keep the default mail client - Evolution or switch over to Thunderbird. Evolution is nicely integrated with task manager and calender, but its spam filter is no match with thunderbird.

Right now, I could not figure out how to get my scanner and PDA working under Ubuntu, it does not come with Linux driver. So I patted myself on my decision to keep the Windows partition and installed Explore2fs utility, that lets you copy Linux files to windows OS and installed openOffice for Windows - so that I can print my charts etc.

Next in line, is to arrange the backups and automate my tasks - afterall Linux is for lazy folks...