It’s way too small. 80 x 25 in 2009? Utterly ridiculous.
But, as I heard before, everything can be solved in Linux, it just takes half an hour. I ended up at Maligree’s Weblog, who offers not one but 3 solutions to the problem, one for bash gurus, one for config wizards and another one for a mysterious Mister Rightclickalot.
I did all three and I’m a happy man.
I wanted to compile ogc for Linux first thing in the morning. Went surprisingly smoothly with a few tricks:
Later I added install, uninstall and clean rules, and prepared the makefile to run on both Linux and cygwin, detecting Windows from the presence of the SYSTEMROOT variable.
Finally I put it under revision control with git. But that’s another story.
It’s no use to babble about reading books and writing Windows programs.
I still have not seen a real Unix.
After having taken some advice from an Ubuntu-fan in the office, I set out to download and write the Ubuntu-CD and install it. It was 8 o’clock in the evening.
First shot: run Ubuntu from the live CD. Not that scary. And looks bloody good, actually.
Second shot: the installation. The most heart stopping moment is when you’ve tried to set it up to shrink your Windows partition and install Ubuntu alongside with a boot-menu, and you click OK. In the next 10 minutes you just keep your fingers crossed while Ubuntu is messing with all your precious data.
But it worked. After reboot I just double-checked Windows and, after a checkdisk, it ran perfectly, as much as possible for Windows.
Move on to Ubuntu. First impression: Gnome looks very good. Second impression: it’s extremely wasteful with my screen with the default settings. Third impression: the immediate-effect settings of Gnome are a Very Good Idea.
I went to bed at 2 in the morning with much smaller fonts, just one panel at the top with a few panel launchers (terminal, mc, firefox), a single-icon main-menu and the weather shown.
