The Noble Experiment part 1 (the plan)

As Roger the Shrubber once said, "There is a pestilence upon this land." That pestilence is Microsoft Windows, particularly Windows Vista, which came pre-loaded on my new Acer Aspire T-690. I've been fighting buying a new computer for about 6 years now, scraping by on used and surplus units. I kept Windows light by running Win2k Professional with no bells and whistles, allowing me to run Macromedia Studio 8 on Pentium III computers. Slowly, I've been eliminating Windows from my home computers in favor of Ubuntu & Xubuntu Linux. I've had to keep one Windows computer to do web design, as Studio is very limited in Ubuntu under Crossover Office. Three weeks ago, the day of judgement came when my only remaining Windows computer, a Dell Inspiron 4100, died, losing a lot of web design client data, I might add. This is one of those bad deaths that you can't recover from no matter what you do. There were missing drivers and damaged registry files. The bottom line, it's still a paperweight until I can get the data off of the physical drive by another means.

So, here I sit with a new computer, running Windows Vista, possibly the worst reviewed permutation of Windows since ME. Thus begins the noble experiment. I plan, by November, to be Windows free. My current setup looks like this:

vista


Windows Vista Home Premium with...




  • Macromedia (not adobe) Studio 8

  • Adobe Photoshop

  • Adobe Illustrator

  • MS Office


Really, the only thing I can't live without is Studio 8 (particularly Fireworks 8, which happens to be the only one that doesn't work well on Wine or Crossover Office.

In spite of the fact that I'm running a 64 bit machine, I hope to install the theme and packages associated with Ubuntu Studio (shown below), which only comes in 32 bit configurations.

screenshot-desktop.png

For my Web Design Suite (Macromedia Studio 8), I intend to run Windows 2000 within Innotek's Virtual Box.

Stay tuned for my triumphs and miserable failures.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

3d Resurrection - Getting your Cube 3 Working again

Image
Perhaps, like us, you unwittingly chose a Cube 3d Printer  for your school or classroom, either because of it's iOS air printing capabilities or because you were sold on the fantasy of it being seamless and simple. LOL... Then, when 3d Systems announced it was discontinuing its line of consumer machines , you may have felt abandoned and hurt and confused. For us, it was a pretty low blow, considering there was no prior announcement about this and we had just purchased one of these bad boys for nearly $800.00; no small amount for a public Middle School. We may have gotten a lot of distance out of this machine, nonetheless, as we had stockpiled quite a few of the proprietary filament cartridges. If you've used one of these at all, though, you know the  filament cartridges are crap , and definitely the weakest link when it comes to this printer. The filament is terrible and you're constantly disassembling and reassembling cartridges. The filament cartridges are also this...
Read more

What happened, Classcraft?

Image
So, my last post focused on including girls in esports and my willingness to take a hard look at my own mistakes and failings. This post focuses on engaging boys in school through gamification and a company we all love's unwillingness to do the same...  on to glory! The success I decided to roll out Classcraft in all of my classes two years ago, and I have found it to be surprisingly effective. I've shared here in the past how not only do students take the health and experience of their characters very seriously, but they also strive to help their teams and classmates in general. One thing that continually surprised me was how much students crave XP (or experience points). Remember, what I do with Classcraft has had no effect on student grades whatsoever. Yet, I've been able to attach points loss / gain consequences to my behavioral and procedural expectations via XP and HP . While these points don't matter in terms of students' grades, they do matter a grea...
Read more

Adobe Photoshop and Distorting Reality

Image
I'm teaching Adobe Photoshop Elements to my eighth grade students for the first three cycles of Technology class this year, and I've been spending a lot of time examining the authentic career applications of such a product. Elements is essentially Photoshop without the Web Design and Graphic Design tools, which limits its practical application to photo enhancement and manipulation. Incidentally, I do have some moral qualms about the primary application of Photoshop in the world of publishing for photo enhancement and manipulation. This situation is nicely summed up by the " Evolution " film, available at Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" web site.   Obviously, this is a reality that I will be sharing with my students, but it begs the following questions: Do we, as educators, have a moral responsibility to equip students with the knowledge of the consequences of the technology we're training them to use? How is it that we are encouraged to teach...
Read more