Recently I stumbled across Matthew Moore’s Mythbusting Linux video on YouTube. Normally I find his videos entertaining and informative. However on this occasion he got quite a few points wrong or just misunderstood. I would have commented below the video but comments were disabled. This isn’t an attack on the video but rather to provide constructive and hopefully informative feedback on some of the issues raised.
Operating Systems
Running Adobe Photoshop CS5 Under Linux
When MS-Windows XP went out of support I upgraded all of my machines to Ubuntu 14.04. Whilst most had been dual-boot, all except one now only run Linux. Two of the few things that I regularly ran under MS-Windows were the odd game and Adobe Photoshop. The games were dealt with by the one computer I left as dual-boot, but Photoshop is a tool that I use often as photography is one of my hobbies. I also wanted to use this on my Linux desktop.
Installing Ubuntu On An Asus Eee 901 PC
I have an Asus Eee PC that had the old Ubuntu Easy Peasy Eee remix on it (I think it was based on 8.04 LTS release). Anyway the software on it was ancient and rather than throw it out I thought I’d install Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and try running the Unity desktop on it.
So what? You may ask. The model of Eee PC that I have is the 901. For those that don’t know; it comes with two SSDs, one fast 4GiB device (that is supposed to hold the operating system) and a slower 16GiB device for user data. See the problem? Yes 4GiB is very small for a modern OS and you don’t really want it running on the slower, larger device.
Well I succeeded and I am writing this blog post on the newly set up Asus Eee PC.
MS-Windows vs Linux
I am quite often asked about Linux as an alternative to MS-Windows, about viruses on Linux or even does Linux slow down like MS-Windows. Being an Open Source advocate you would think that my answer would be clear-cut. However it is not as simple as it looks.
Gdm3 Does Not Honour X Server Font Settings
I have just upgraded to using Gdm3 on my Debian machines. I quickly noticed that the font path setting specified in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf
file was not being honoured. I use a font server and have "unix/:7100"
as my font path.