IE and Kubuntu are go!

I was having a discussion with a web developer friend of mine the other day about Kubuntu. He made the very valid point that he still needs a windows install around to do thorough testing of IE browser support on a windows box.

Well I have IE 5.5 and 6.0 running on Kubuntu (and no I'm not using VMWare). I found a very nifty little script in my blog reading this morning which installs IE 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 for you (you can choose which versions you want). The magic all happens with IEs4Linux (also check out his blog - looks like IE7 support is there too - maybe this will convince me to finally install IE7). It installs with a minimum of fuss and hassle. In fact with ADSL2+ the install is lightning fast.

The only requirement is that you have Wine installed and cabextract (a program to extract Microsoft Cabinet files). Using Adept Manager I had these installed in minutes. Following the Kubuntu instructions on the IEs4Linux was incredibly straightfoward. Within minutes I had two fancy looking IE icons on my desktop (an upside down IE logo in what looks like a cocktail glass), and I was ready to go.

I have a screenshot of IE 5.5, IE 6.0 and Firefox running behind it. No hacks, no pain. It Just Works. Very impressive. Just to prove that it really is IE I've loaded up Bento's blog Waffle which proudly gives IE the middle finger. You can see what I mean in the screenshot :)

So while it's not IE on Windows, it's about as close as you'll get whilst running a Linux distro. I say give it a whirl :)

Kubuntu - Oh What a Feeling :D

Ok - so I'm typing this post from my newly installed Kubuntu (which is pretty much just Ubuntu with KDE as the default window manager). It's very very nice.

I'm just copying across my mp3s from my USB external hard disk and we'll be good to go. I have Gaim installed and configured (which I was using on Windows anyway - it wees all over MSN and Trillian (which is just plain ugly)). Kubuntu pre-installs OpenOffice which I was also using on my Windows XP box, and I have Firefox 2.0 up and running.

It's been about 9 years since I ran Linux exclusively on my desktop at home, and that only lasted about 18 months. Boy o boy has Linux come a long way. I haven't had to go hunting around for my XConfig file. I haven't spent days looking for an obscure X server driver. Everything Just Works. In fact, it's interesting to note that I've installed and configured Kubuntu to my tastes faster than it normally takes to download, configure and install Cygwin (a tool that any serious programmer familiar with *nixs would usually install on their Windows boxen).

Ah, I love it. Let me see, I have Adept which appears to be a kickarse GUI interface to the powerful apt-get packaging system we've all been envious of from Debian. I have an audio player already installed (mp3s work with barely any fuss). I have CD and DVD burning software, a powerful media player in Kaffeine. I have an RSS reader pre-installed. I have Bluetooth chat (!), a bittorrent client, an IRC client, a PDF reader out of the box, Konqueror - a kick arse web browser (arguably better than Firefox in some sense - just ask Apple - Safari heart KHTML and all that). I have all that Linux brings to the development table (Windows has nothing on Linux - and no I'm not convinced that Powershell will make much of a difference), and all of this is wrapped up in a really quite beautiful GUI (I rate it way higher than XP or other MS derivatives - Mac OS X still rocks - though Ubuntu is definitely up there).

For those who want to take a peek you can click on the smaller image below for a full res screenshot of what Kubuntu looks like on my desktop (1280x1024). Even the process of taking this image was effortless. Hitting printscreen on your keyboard automatically brings up a snapshot program which wants to save your desktop as a PNG for you. Excellent :)



I'll get to know Kubuntu better over the next week or so and post some more, so stay tuned :)

One last point. People who are interested in Linux, or Free Software in general (there is a convincingly philosophical argument behind this) should definitely check Ubuntu out. You can download it here. Give it a go. If you're a developer and you're happy to put the time in I can't imagine you'd fail to be impressed.

XP to Kubuntu

I'm going to switch from Windows XP to Kubuntu on my desktop at home.

I'll post rants about it in the coming weeks :)