I love WINE under Ubuntu

Another reason to ditch Windows…

After a year and a half of fighting Vista on my Toshiba A135-S2276 I gave up.  Quite simply I got sick of the problems, errors, lock ups, “security” pop-ups and general sluggishness.  So to sort of future proof me, also since I figured it was easier, I bought a new hard drive cheap (seriously gigs are pennies each wtf?) and swapped it in and decided to go dual boot.  I had tried Ubuntu Live-CD before on this and it had worked decently well 6.04. Hardy Heron 8.04 is so nice on my main desktop that I knew I had to install that and then XP for my work programs.

Now XP was a bear.  I just want to say ahead of time that if you want to install XP… prepare for some painful moments.  But the fact I was able to find a compresed folder of “tweaked” drivers for XP finally saved my sanity. The long and short is that Toshiba did not make or provide XP Drivers, and then for hardware they used in XP machines also, they changed hardware IDs in cases, breaking XP drivers for the same hardware on other laptops.  So simple things like Video, Sound, Wireless Network Card, and ACPI did not have drivers. What made it even more painful was how simple and easy Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 installed on it in a dual boot setup.

Now after all the fighting to get Windows working I decided to give WINE a shot and try installing Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator* and a few other programs I still keep Windows around for.  And they installed rediculously easy. I opened up the config, answered couple questions and clicked my way through every tab, and then stuck the install CD in. Now it wasn’t perfect.  The menus and everything was setup for a Windows machine and seems mouse-type at the resolution I originally had it at.  Also I tried installing itunes… That doesn’t work at all. (So Apple please get a linux client or perhaps send one engineer to talk to the WINE group about fixing compatibility.)  So I’ve had to squint a little or change the resolution a little, otherwise I’m golden.  And my XP license I bought a long time ago gets put to use on only an occasional basis.

* Since the CS Suites are so integrated I didn’t bother trying either my CS2 or CS3 licenses on this.  My pre-CS versions would work fine for everyday work… and I’ll install the Suite under Windows without stressing about it.

Tags: Adobe, Design, Interesting, Linux, OSes, Review, Software, Ubuntu, Windows, Wine