Back Online With GNU/Linux

It's been a few weeks since I've had a reliable PC to use at home. My PC running Windows XP had been on all night, until we had a brief power outage, and disk 2 of my RAID-0 array had a hardware failure. One of the bad blocks landed right on user32.dll, and I was unable to get the system back up and running. I figured that during the drive replacement, it was not only a good chance to finally switch over to a RAID-1 so that I wouldn't be down for so long next time a drive dies, but I also partitioned so that I could have a dedicated install of Ubuntu.

For the last year or two, I had been running Ubuntu inside VirtualBox in Windows. Although it was a decent setup, it lacked the ability to easily try some of the lower-level features like support for sound and other hardware. I had long been suggesting that people switch from Windows to Linux, but hadn't fully made the jump myself. I'm still working my way through my list of software and selecting free software alternatives, and I'll shortly post a list of some of the applications that I've found.

This was one of the best sights, and I'm glad that Wifi is finally getting good support on the Linux desktop.