Start your engines; it’s a Linux era!

December 29, 2009

(This article was first published on Stats raving mad » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

Well, I’m writing this from my new system. After years on hiatus I migrated to Linux, once again. Setting up a full system on Linux for a Greek user had been one of the greatest challenges.

First,of all setting up writing, reading & printing in Greek was the biggest obstacle, I still recall memories of 2000/2001 when installing the 9th (?) edition of Mandrake Linux, supposed to have full Greek language integration. As if? Second, comes networking with Linux. Win-modems ruled Greek market and made it really painful to read all these articles to even start hoping that you might be near configuring your Internet connection.

Yet, I used Linux till 2003 or 2004 with no Internet connection and used my Windows to surf the net… Courageous, right? Last night I was surfing for open source ideas and stumbled upon Wuby. Wubi is a windows-ish application for Ubuntu, the hottest for users of my clan! I installed on my disk, chose my graphical environment (Gnome, no regrets) and one thing left to check…the Internet highway.

Turns out that, routers (those using Ethernet ports!) are plug & go. Neat! Unfortunatelly, I’m stuck with my USB model my provider gave a couple of years ago ;( Sad thoughts paid a short visit I must admit. But, even this was no real problem, UbuDSL has everything under control :thumps up:

Of, course I installed RKWard, there’s a Windows version, too. I never got to make it work, though…