Well I’ve built my new PC. Core2Duo, 8800GTS, 2Gb, 2*750Gb on RAID1 all in a full tower Thermaltake Armor case. It’s a beauty :)

I made the decision long ago to go FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) when I finally got around to this build. And I have. Ubuntu 7 Feisty Fawn is the only OS on it. It was ridiculously easy to install. Everything worked first time. Of course I need to install the video drivers - but Alberto Milone’s Envy made it easy. And that was it. Fully installed Operating system that is so much faster than anything Microsoft have provided. Full productivity suite and various software installed by default. And any other software I want it available with a simple terminal command or if you want the slow way through the Synaptic GUI. And all free!

Then on to the hard stuff. I’m a gamer. But all games are Windows games right? Nope. Unreal Tournament has a Linux port - it’s on the DVD. So that one was easy. World of Warcraft is the other one I play at the moment. Now that one’s Windows only. WINE to the rescue. Installed Wine with apt-get and installed WoW inside it. Took about 10 minutes to get it installed. Then the acid test - patches. Kicked off Wow - patches downloaded and installed automatically - no problem. And getting a framerate of 60-70 in game so Wine not causing any problems there either. Happy days.

Then the other stuff I needed. Cisco VPN was a bit of a problem. I need it for work but the current version is not directly compatible with the current Kernel. A little googling and I found a patch and step by step instructions to get it working. Wasn’t too hard - just took a little research. And that’s it - machine with a whole new OS (to me) working perfectly. Now I just need to learn how to do everything in the terminal. You can use the GUI for a lot of stuff but where’s the fun in that ;)

So I’m Microsoft free at last. No requirement for proprietary software anymore. And the performance increase is high using software that doesn’t feel the need to give you value for money by including crap you never will need. I’m happy anyway.