Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Migrating to Linux, Day 2

I finally got fed up with Vista and decided to switch over to Linux Mint 14 as my primary OS...

...with the intent of never going back.

Will I survive?

Ok, I haven't given up Windows entirely. Wine and VirtualBox are in play. Both look promising. Also, I've mounted my Win NTFS partition read/write. (Ha, you kids have it easy now! Why, back in my day...)

The cause of my switch? WinAVR is 3 years out of date and doesn't support the ATtiny84A of which I just bought 3 to test my ATtiny24/44/84 target board. In frustration I built the entire AVR toolchain from scratch on Mint following Lady Ada's tutorial.

My first pain was the awful, too-twitchy mouse. Got that fixed with some xinput/xset magic.

Losing Picasa sucks. Either digiKam will have to do or it's Picasa in Wine (as Google originally shipped it for Linux). I wished I could see what pictures I've uploaded to Picasaweb.

LTSpice works great in Wine. Eagle is fast but with a niggling key binding issue.

Chrome, GIMP, no problem.  I want Notepad++ back.

I'd just fallen in love with TortoiseSVN... thankfully, RabbitVCS works very similarly. Although Mint/Nemo isn't officially supported, it works a-ok with a little trickery.

Probably my biggest regret/pain is having just paid for Carbonite. That was the one thing holding me back from Linux and the one thing tempting me to go back to Windows. I hate to waste that money.


  1. I was 100% linux from 1994-1999, but grew tired of having to do so much system administration, library management and upgrade-due-to-bugs. I much prefer getting things done as opposed to having to rebuild libjpeg so I can get the Python Imaging Library installed.

    I switched to Mac ten years ago this month. Just last month, I bought Win7 and 8 while they were cheap. They're running in two virtual machines on my mac. The main reason is to try Avr Studio 6.


  2. Check out Sublime Text 2 as an editor. It's replaced Notepad++ for most of my coworkers and is cross platform. Unfortunately not free, but has a fully enabled trial.

    Kate is also popular with my more frugal friends, though I have never used it and relies heavily on the KDE ecosystem.

    I use vim, but I wouldn't recommend picking up vim or emacs until you have other parts of your workflow figured out. Adding difficulty to editing text/code on top of everything else can be really discouraging.

  3. @daphreak - thanks, will check those out. Funny you mention vim and emacs: those are my *fallback* editors, having learned to use those 15+ years ago :D

