Flight from Twisted Vista (was Re: Ok. Heh, is there still...)

This thread seems to have taken on an undead life of it's own. Time to 
change my original subject to something more accurate...

Funny how timely a subject this is, as it's what I've been kicking around 
for the last few months, as well. Heck a group of us were standing around 
discussing exactly this subject in our messaging IT group just last week.

Like quite a few people in here, I make a living supporting M$ 
infrastructure (last 12yrs+). It's the demon I know, and I've made a decent 
living doing it. But having said that, I've got zero interest in shifting 
any of the five XP machines we have at home to Vista (wife & I's Dell 
laptops, an HP video/podcast/torrent DL box, an old P3-650 Micron that does 
low & slow vid-compression, and our SageTV-based hometheather box).

-I don't like the DRM/HDCP/AACS or paying a vendor that's repeatedly 
demonstrated they aim to serve 3rd-parties interests over me, the paying 
customer. I built a SageTV htpc a yr ago to replace my lifetime-subscr TiVo 
(once it dies) for the same reasons. Gotta love the potential for vista 
"killing" an entire range of hardware that becomes "suspect" simply to suit 
the insecurities of the HD-DVD folk.

-I don't like the new licensing limited lifespan (Per M$ only RETAIL copies 
of Vista are transferable to your next home-built computer, and then, only 
_ONCE_. Prepare to weedle M$ for new keys, down the road)

-For Gaming: I've got an Xbox360 & PS/2 that I play games on these days 
(and a Gamefly sub to keep them stocked) -- haven't run a game on my main 
box since I last fired up VTM:bloodlines a year or so ago. Without the need 
to continuously upgrade my hardware to play new game releases, and no need 
to try to "buy" better multiplayer performance against other players by 
buying more hardware (360 is a pretty "level" playing field), a big part of 
my last ten years of upgrade rat race are now gone. "Improved" Gaming OS 
support was the only reason I upgraded from 98se to XP when I finally made 
that change -- well after most folks, as I recall.:D

-HDTV: I don't own an HDTV -- 99% of my tv viewing is sourced on an old 
sdtv Tivo. And I have no interest in watching HD on my pc or laptop. Not to 
mention with vista's DRM, I _really_ would have reasons not to. I do enough 
quick DVD viewing, while authoring/ripping discs that I know it's a pain in 
the ass to watch a movie at the range of a couple of feet.

-Media-support: I'll NEVER run MCE for any home theater -- my brother does, 
but he has lower expectations and does substantially less with the box.:D 
SageTV (which is available for Linux) outputs all of it's recordings in 
friendly non-drm avi format. Ready to burn/archive/remix, whatever. Heck 
even my Squeezebox mp3-headunit can run it's backend just dandy under 
linux! And it offloads the mem-footprint onto a background server, where it 
won't impact TV recording.

So, I'm actually at the point now that our next home desktop OS after XP 
will not be on a M$ platform. There's alot of technical folks I respect 
that run Linux/*nix servers and Mac desktops, and Linux has always been a 
possibility, not to mention it doesn't require replacing any hardware or 
buying all new software.

The meat and potatoes of my daily computer use can be done with any OS 
(firefox, tbird, & sub in OpenOfc for excel & word). So, which apps really 
'tie' me to XP: Photoshop, and some convenience tools that would be nice to 
have on-hand.

And that's where virtualization comes in: Due to cisco-vpn restrictions in 
my firm's client, several months ago I started running all of my work 
vpn-access out of a canned little xp vmware session on my xp box's desktop. 
It does everything I need, is low-overhead, and lets cisco's little fascist 
config believe that the rest of the world is 'locked out', while I'm 
accessing work... while I continue to surf the web and my home-life goes 
blissfully on in the background.

 From there, I had no choice but to pull down a free copy of vmware server 
and install it on one of my servers (which had little else to do, since 
it's primary role was as a redundant domain controller, dns & backup 
server). So I stocked it with a whole suite of vmware images of a variety 
of os's and apps for testing/evaluating/playing-with: Exchange2007beta, 
SQL2k5, Mom2k5, a variety of Unices, some odd Linuxes. Beos. Pretty much 
anything: if it's not installed yet, I've probably dug around on the docs 
and grabbed the necessary isos.:P I added the vmware server client on my xp 
box, and that little vpn-xp vm happily hopped it's load over to the server.

Of course, the nifty thing about all this is that I can run vmware just as 
well under Linux! Next step is probably going to be converting the above 
server to an Ubuntu box.

Extending this vm-use, have you guys seen the write-up at Lifehacker... 
(http://lifehacker.com/software/linux/run-windows-apps-on-your-linux-desktop-229832.php),
... pointing to an article on 2X ApplicationServer for Win Termserv?
(http://searchopensource.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1238129,00.html)
(http://www.2x.com/applicationserver/)

2XAS has a free download with a perpetual license for a 5-connection 
version. This app essentially delivers 'citrix-like' publishing of apps 
from out of a background vm right onto your linux desktop, with the vm-apps 
appearing as individual app windows. It delivers windows apps seamlessly 
into linux! I haven't tried it out yet, but I'm definitely going to.

Beyond the above, for folks hung on Photoshop, there are quite a few 
write-ups on getting ps running under Linux with Wine. One I stumbled 
across recently was:
http://lifehacker.com/software/photoshop/how-to-install-photoshop-on-ubuntu-206827.php

And hey, who runs a linux install with the default interfaces in this 
community? We're about tweaking things out! Heh, the first time I installed 
slackware, a good 10 years ago, it was to be able to try out Windowmaker & 
Enlightenment!:D It's really not that difficult to tweak out a given 
distro's interface. As usual. Google is your friend.:D

Todd
tin_omen

todd kadrie  |  tin_omen-gfZTEr3/[email protected] |  desktopian.org