I am now trying to think of what I should remove or tweak next. I find it funny that with all the programs and files I have on the system now it’s only 20GB used and a large portion of that is the documents and files I have in my home folder Can we say Bloatware?

I am looking back on the things I have been doing through this experiment and it pleases me to see I am able to do a lot of things I was able to do under Windows just fine.

Netflix REALLY needs to get on the ball with the instant streaming stuff because this is a pain in the nuts having it be Silverlight 2.0 only. That is primarily one of the only things I miss so far.

Speaking of streaming I need to think about finding info about how to get my DirecTV DVR and this machine to talk so I can stream movies or pictures. I got it going under windows before. I also will have to hard-wire the laptop so I can get a decent connection for that as well.

It would be awesome to be able to stream videos off of the lappy because I have a ton of AVI’s I backed up onto DVD-R’s that I could easily copy onto the hard drive to play better. Maybe I will do this later today.. Or start that.

The issue I had with ripping movies in the past is the sound didn’t sync with the video. It was like watching an old Kung Fu movie but more annoying for the audio. You”d hear a bang and then see it 5 seconds later. Not good.

I looked around for some more games to play. I downloaded a RTS game called Warzone 2100. Here’s a blip from the developer:

Warzone 2100 is a real-time strategy game, originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive, now developed by the Warzone 2100 Project. Compared to other real-time strategy games, it has a greater focus on artillery, radar, and counter-battery technologies, more frequent in-game cinematic updates as game play progresses, a massive research tree, as well as a vehicle design system.

Now the only way to install this under Linux is to compile it so I have to do that… Later.

There is a windows based client so I can play with you Windows folks if you wanna.

So not too much done today, I had to look at a co-worker’s home computer for him. They were getting a lot of poor performance on their machine. Hrm WinXP and only 512MB of Ram?! BAD!

I post these the day after I do them. In other words, all this that I am posting here on Thursday was actually done on Wednesday. In case you hadn’t figured it all out yet.  Oh and today (Thursday 8/13) is my birthday. I don’t know what I will be able to do when I get out of work so Day 14 will be real short.

Feeling a need to play a MMO type game I gave in and installed Second Life. Call me a loser now, LOL. If you are on Second Life, add me as a friend VooDooStevie Mixmaster is the name of my character on there.

After installing the program from GetDeb I found there is a newer version of the game out so I downloaded it and copied the files over to the install location on my hard drive. And voila it worked.

I played the game for a bit. No issues with the game really. Nothing that would seem more like a bandwith issue, but they really smoothed it out since my last time playing it which was like 4 years ago.

I found some free clothes and items for my Avatar, tomorrow I will post the image of my Avatar as he is. Downside is I can’t get it to look more like me.

Everything else is running right. I’m still getting my podcasts fine, album art is still a little issue, but not 100% important to me, I can still listen to them which is what I really needed.

I am a little apprehensive as to how my music collection is sorted so I am looking for something to fix that. I think I have to pull the Podcasts out of that directory for things to properly sort things. I found cowbell as a music management and sorting utility so I will install that and see what happens.

It’s almost 2 weeks into this experiment. I need to get on the podcast thing soon! And play with Skype as well.

I completely backed up all my important Windows based things (in case I return to windows) and all my important documents (podcasts, itunes settings, pictures, and other stuff) onto my external harddrive.

Took a DEEP breath and put the installation CD into my CD drive and rebooted the machine.

The setup process is pretty cut and dry. Choose language and locations,  input name, choose username, choose a strong password, partition the hard drive… Okay this is where I REALLY took a deep breath because I told it to use the ENTIRE DISK! Sit back as it erases and formats all of the hard drive and installs the OS.

After it was done installing I rebooted the machine. Automatically wireless connection works! And now to download all the updates since I burned the install CD (186 updates to perform). After that I had to reboot again so the new kernel will take place.

Once I was back up I installed the Flash Player, VLC, Ubuntu restricted extras then I installed Boxee (reported they had Netflix Playback, dunno as of yet, need to play with it).

I then setup Pidgin for instant messaging. I miss Digsby, but I have used Pidgin before under windows. I can’t wait for Digsby to have a Linux version. HURRY GUYS!!!!

Next, I installed Amarok and Syncropated! to see if that will get the iPod podcasting need situated. Apparently Amarok discontinued podcast features in the latest version.

This sucks, its a decent player so I will keep it for other things I guess.

I then installed gPodder. With gPodder, I resubscribed to all my old podcasts that were under windows.. Now to wait for them to download..  Zzz… Okay I can’t sit doing nothing, so I moved on while it downloaded them.

I uninstalled Sycropated! It didn’t work at all. Some of my resources that I found on Google mentioned using it, but I guess it was for the older iPods and not the Widescreen Nano I have currently.

I downloaded Adobe Air to install so I could get Tweetdeck back. After installing Air I got Tweetdeck installed and tweeting is back for me. Yay!

I installed Wine but I have not toyed with it yet. Wine is supposedly useful incase you need to run a Windows based application. But I don’t know if I will be playing with it just yet. Trying to seperate myself from the Microsoft OS Crutch.

Lastly I changed my desktop image to something personalized. Didn’t feel like staring at the brown themed desktop that is the default one. After this I decided it really was time for bed. I started this at 7:30 PM but I feel I got a lot done during this time. More to do tomorrow.