my  block

where uzairs roam

Seems I’ve permanently broken Ubuntu. I’m not sure quite what happened — I was switching my partitions around so that /home would be off on its own, and the next thing I knew, half my documents were gone and Kubuntu wasn’t booting (’kdestartupconfig’ has troubles, apparently). Anyway, I salvaged my Windows installation and tried starting from scratch with Ubuntu, wiping out the partitions, reinstalling, and…again, the ‘kdestartupconfig’ problem! Quite bizarre, because there doesn’t seem to be a solution, just lots of agonised wailing on the forums.

So, for a month, I went back to XP. I booted my Windows CD and used the repair console to get rid of GRUB, and made do with things as they were pre-Ubuntu. That was pretty successful, actually — Opera made the transition mostly seamless for me, and I prefer Outlook over KMail anyday anyway.

And then a few days ago, I figured it was wasteful letting my Vista DVD sit around, so I unpacked it and installed. After all the FUD that’s been going around, and a limited experiment with the RC1 on VirtualPC, I was a little worried to see how Zujitsu (umm, yeah I named laptop) would take it. A recap of the specs: Centrino 1.6, 1.25GB RAM, integrated graphics.

Well, pilgrims, I’m here to tell you it went great. Vista installed seamlessly with all the right drivers and settings (which is something I’ve come to take for granted since the Ubuntu experience), and was pretty snappy about it too. The interface is a bit overwhelming because it’s different. I mean, different. Things like ‘Documents’ and ‘Pictures’ are now symlinks, which is going to be tricky to figure out for non-geeks. Still, it’s fairly intuitive, so it doesn’t take long to figure out how to do things. The performance is excellent, though obviously I don’t have Aero running, which sadly also means I don’t have Flip3D. Without Aero, the UI is still striking and handsome, though not nearly as beautiful. The Sidebar and gadgets are very simple to set up and very useful (the Slideshow gadget has brought up pictures I haven’t seen in years!), and on the whole things feel very well put-together, which was my one huge gripe about Ubuntu. I do regret not having Aero, but it’s nice to see the UI degrades gracefully, and it’s also very nice to see that the performance of the OS itself is more than respectable — I swear I hear the system groaning less than it used to under XP. Oh, and the system notification sounds are soooo much less irritating.

I also installed Office 2007, which is similarly very nice. It’s got the new Ribbons interface, and it’s amazing how usable it is. Honestly, no more digging around the menus to get to elusive options: if they’re likely to be of use to you, they’re right there on the ribbon waiting to be used. Outlook overhaul is mostly cosmetic, with the exception of the new RSS subscription capability which hooks up with IE7 (very convenient) and lets you handle feeds as you would emails, which is of course the logical thing to do. LookOut, the erstwhile email search engine is built-in now, so it’s easy to search through feeds, messages, and whatever else. I’m disappointed to see ReachOut (the newsgroup subscription tool) didn’t make it into this version of Office. Newsgroup subscriptions remain the one reason why Windows Mail/Outlook Express remains important to me, and I’ll be delighted to be rid of it.

Right, so that’s my migration post. I expect I’ll be back to moan and groan about Vista still not being Unix at some point…I still despise Cygwin with the very essence of my soul.