I recently decided to take the plunge and see whether Linux would work for me. I picked Ubuntu Linux, because I'd heard good things about the Ubuntu install and user experience, and I've always used Red Hat before so I wanted to see what life was like with Debian's vaunted packaging system. So, I backed up my important data, and installed.

To win this challenge, Linux needed to be able to completely replace my Windows 2000 setup. So I didn't even bother setting up a dual-boot configuration, I just wiped the whole hard disk and gave it all to Ubuntu.

The results have been, unsurprisingly, mixed. The installation went smoothly. I've been 100% satisfied with the aforementioned Debian packaging system. The desktop is pleasing, the fonts don't suck like they used to on other Linux installs I've tried, and by and large all my allegedly cross-platform applications (Firefox, IDEA, etc.) were able to make the transition, and I have a working system. It may be my imagination, but it seems marginally faster than Windows 2000 also. I also was shocked and amazed to discover a very useable Windows Terminal Server client was included, which makes my life a lot easier.

There are some things I had a lot of trouble with, though, and I'm going to post them here in case some other unfortunate soul is out there scouring the net looking for solutions to problems that no one else seems to have.

Microsoft VPN

It turns out that it's actually pretty easy to set up a VPN to a Microsoft VPN server. First, ignore all the HOWTOs and documentation that you find when you do a Google search for "linux VPN setup" or somesuch. That is all for non-Microsoft VPNs, and will only confuse you. What you want is pptp. Unless you want to do more reading than I did, you'll probably want the GUI for it as well. You can get these with apt-get or synaptic, you need pptp and pptp-config. Setting up your pptp configuration is straightforward. However, beware the GUI, it's very nonstandard and you may accidentally lose your configuration a few times before you figure out how to save it.

External serial mouse

Ubuntu didn't detect my external serial mouse during the install, though to be fair I'm not entirely sure it was plugged in at the time - it didn't occur to me that this would take special planning. It does. However, I've learned that xf86cfg is your friend in this case. It's a little graphical depiction of your X setup, and you can use this to add a second mouse with little trouble. Hints: The right-click menu (which you need to use to configure the mouse once you've added it to your setup) requires you to hold the right button while you make your choice. Once you've configured the mouse, you need to enable it, that will draw the little connecting line like you see for the other devices. Finally, ctrl-alt-backspace to restart X. After that your mouse should work.

The LCD/CRT switch

This one was tricky. Hitting Fn-F3 on my laptop switched the display from the builtin LCD to the external CRT when I was using windows. Under Ubuntu, its only function was to lock the system so badly I had to pull the power. I searched and searched, and found nothing useful. Eventually, I decided to switch to the as-yet-unfinished HoaryHedgehog release of Ubuntu to see if that would help. It did help; after the upgrade I could use the LCR/CRT switch and it would actually do something. It would switch to the CRT and display lots of colorful garbage there. More investigation reveals that X isn't capable of switching monitors midstream. If you're going to switch, either do the switch before X starts, or ctrl-alt-backspace it and switch before gdm comes back up. Then it will work fine.

Migrating Thunderbird mail

I hoped this would be as simple as copying the profiles folder from my Windows install to the .thunderbird folder in my home directory. Alas, not quite. It wasn't too bad, though. The trick is, you're going to have to set up a new Thunderbird profile, add in all your accounts, and then copy the mail and address book individually. If you try to copy the whole profile en masse, Thunderbird dies whenever it launches a sub-window (e.g., the email composer window, or the preferences window).

Wireless PCMCIA card

Plugging in my wireless card accomplished exactly nothing. I took a guess and opened up a terminal window, did sudo dhclient, and voila, the network was working. How I happened to know there was a progam called dhclient and what it did I don't remember now....

Printing to Windows printers

This is a nightmare, still ongoing. The printers dialog (known to the cognoscenti as gnome-cups-manager, I eventually discovered) seems to provide an easy way to set up printing to a remote Windows printer. It certainly worked just fine for a locally connected printer. For a networked Windows printer, it's a nightmare. It happilly takes your input and reports no errors, but then it turns out that it's garbled your username and password.

I eventually found out that gnome-cups-manager works with the CUPS daemon, which is configured via /etc/cups/printers.conf. It would have been helpful to have some kind of help to that effect in the gnome-cups-manager applet itself, but oh well. Reading through that file, I figured out what the problem was: the special characters in my password weren't being escaped, and so the parsing of the Samba URL for the printer was messed up. Even entering in the data by hand in the /etc/cups/printers.conf file doesn't seem to have helped, though. By the way, you'll have to kill and restart cupsd after you make changes to printers.conf if you want to see your changes in the gnome-cups-manager.

Sound

I have none. Not sure why yet. I'll add an update if I ever get around to figuring this out. Update (03 JAN 2005): I didn't have sound under Warty. After upgrading to Hoary, my volume control applet crashed when I used it, so I assumed sound still wasn't working. But now, it does, at least for the Flash plugin. Haven't heard any system sounds yet, but at least the volume control applet works today.

Personal firewall

I used ZoneAlarm under Windows, can't seem to find anything that simple for Linux. From casual Googling, it seems as if the approved way to set up your firewall has changed with each kernel release lately. I don't know which one is the latest, or how to set it up. If you know a simple solution, by all means let me know and I'll post it here with credits. Update (12 JAN 2005): Alex Drahon solved the problem nicely.