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How Long Does it Take You to Tweak a New Box?
An anonymous reader asks: "When you get a new computer, how long does it take to make it 'home'? On a Windows system, there seem to be a huge number of preferences I have to choose before it is really comfortable (doing things like: installing software; changing the wallpaper and color schemes; start menu layout; and so forth). How long do you have to fiddle with computer until you have it set up the way you like? Do you use any shortcuts to speed up the process?"
Just tweak it until your happy and then ghost it to a backup drive. When it gets filled with cruft wipe and restore.
When I do the whole burn-down-rebuild on a system, I let it evolve to my tastes. I like a change of scenery now and then, and a new OS install is the right time for me to get that. I try new apps, new desktops, new ideas all around. I might do KDE next time, I might stick with Gnome. I get new icon sets, experiment with new color schemes and wallpapers. It keeps me entertained and I always end up with a usable desktop in the end.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
Ah the icons... First I tell XP not to display anything but a garbage can(trash). It goes on bottom right (thanks apple) Then files that I'm working on get saved to desktop. Files i'm done with go in My Docs (also not displayed) and things that I was working on, and never finished go in a 'drop box' shortcut...
o unds.html
All together, there are only 2 icons that get to call my desktop home, Recycled and dropbox. I'm thinking about remove recycled.
Then I go find a desktop background that's not a corporate endorsement, or a woman, car, sports team. They're usually something abstract... and contrast with the icons rather well... meaning large fields of solid colors. It needs to be something that will span 3 screens. I tried a pic of the kids once, but it was too hard to find the icons against the background.
The 3rd one on this page has been my favorite for a long time. http://www.9xmedia.com/Pages-products/2000-Backgr
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
My biggest concern are not the packages, which can be quickly enough downloaded and installed as you described (though I use dpkg --get-selections/--set-selections) but changing the default configs.
That's particularly annoying when the program depends on the particular hw (eg xorg.conf) because I can't copy a config from another box.
Another thing that makes me lose time is downloading the latest stable kernel sources from kernel.org, changing the default config, compiling, installing and troubleshooting the new kernel. I'm always missing something... I use make-kpkg, that helps compiling installing and archiving my pre-compiled kernel packages. I'm not sure it's a good choice, from the security point of view, not to use the debian kenel, but I often need something that's stable enogh only in newer kernels.
Installing the packages takes just 20min, but adding up the rest, it takes me from 2 to 3 hours usually to finish, depending on what the box runs.
I'm a Linux user, so the process is simple:
Heheh, I love this comment because it is so indicative of the "my OS is better than your OS" that, unfortunately, a small number of Linux users suffer from. Let me restate his build with mine using windows...
his...
1 - install new version of favorite distro (currently Ubuntu)
2 - use package manager to install any additional apps
3 - Use and enjoy!
mine...
1 - Install new version of current stable windows version (right now msce)
2 - Install all additional apps from my backup/media storage drive
3 - use and enjoy!
Hehe, just awesome... the ignorance... the egotism. Like windows users are suffering at home in a brightly lit office, sweat pouring down our face. Constantly on hold with a Dell representative (because we only use Dells of course) begging the operator to explain to us why our computer came with a cup-holder and not the DVD-RW we paid for!!! Oh noes!!!
I'm using the same debian installation for 5+ years now. It survived multiple computers, harddrives etc.
I'm still customizing it. There are a lot of tweaks that make my pc more productive, lots of scripts I've written over the years.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
svn checkout http://my.dotfiles.home/dotfiles dotfiles
cd dotfiles
make
Kinda like how OS X will do import of your settings/home directory from another comptuer over firewire. Just boot your old computer with 'T' held down and Setup will copy all your users, system preferences, and even applications if you let it.
Overall, I'd say OS X has the shortest "initial setup time" of anything I've used. Although I guess it depends on how many macports you depend on...
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I remember when Windows 95 first came out, and a bunch of us (comp sci majors) immediately tried out Linux. One guy who was an assembly language freak (and who knew quite a bit about Windows programming) wrote his own start menu, taskbar, and sort of Windows 95 emulator; he said "why upgrade? looks the same, doesn't it?"
The thing that really burned our asses was the registry and the implementation of long filenames (which worked in Win95, but NOT the DOS underneath it that you could boot to).
We could not figure out why anyone in their right mind would stop using flat files for system configuration. And we asked each other, "how the hell are we going to back up our machines?" The long filenames meant that you couldn't boot to DOS and do a zip backup the way we used to under DOS/Win3.1. You could back up, but never restore, because DOS couldn't put the long filenames back! Oh, how we hated it. If Knoppix had existed back then, it would have been a non-issue, and we would have laughed it off, but you usually couldn't even boot off a CD in those days (which is why Windows came with a boot floppy at the time).
The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had to essentially lobotomize it.
UGH.
But, hey! We sure had fun with Linux! So it wasn't ALL bad...
NO CARRIER
Then it would seem not worth it, unless you were seeing over 5-10% of time/comfort savings. Then again, some people just tweak for fun, and it's its own reward. (please mod me up for proper it's/its use!)
Installing Win XP Pro from CD w/Sp2 takes me about 8 hours on a Compaq V2000Z with 2G RAM with all applications and data.
loopback adapter, printer drivers(2), scanner drivers(3), Palm data (maps, addr book etc), camera drivers
eclipse and add ons, Enterprise Arch, MagicDraw, WSAD5.0 multi-edit, openlazlo server, CSE Val, AGen, VS6, Nemo, zone alarm, firefox, ad aware
MySqlDb and tools, OracleDb and tools, DB2 and tools, test data for the DBs, several versions of JDK's and JRE's.
Whatever current system(s) I'm working on now, and probably a few older ones also.
Then my personal apps and the usual horde of data files.
Pretty much the whole day.
I gave up and use Konqueror for file management when I know I don't care about launching stuff like videos (it will launch VLC, but it launches a new VLC every time, I'm sure I can fix that, but I don't care). But for previews of directories full of photos, or split-window copying, I just run back to Konq every time.
I wasn't about to pay for a file manager either. Window shading is the same deal. There's WindowShade X, but jeez, why do I need to spend money for this thing really? I've just learned to deal without that.
I like music
Focus follows mouse (without auto-raise) is the only way to read one window while typing in another, without the window you're typing in raising to the foreground and obscuring the window you're reading from.
For laptops or any non-multi screen system it's the only way to go.
When I'm using windows it's the biggest thing I miss. There's a power tool that allows you to set it up, but many windows apps behave badly without the click to focus behavior.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Vista is the first operating system that I've been happy with out of the box. I still have the default background and theme. The only personalization I did was add some gadgets to the side bar, and make the desktop icons bigger.
As far as my development environment goes, that seems to change every week anyway, so...
There's nothing wrong with anything - Phillip J. Fry
*point to 3rd line*
I can have a fully set up and updated XP box inside of 3 hours... 1.5 if I use a slipstream disk.
I know none of us RTFA, but can we at least RTFC?
In all seriousness, I was relating to the most standard method of XP installs, which is "put the disc in, install, then do a few hundred megs of updates". When I'm looking for speed in my installs, yeah, I can use a slipstream disk, hell, I'll make a HD image if I'm doing a multi-station rollout.
The parent poster, however, was comparing a freshly-downloaded Linux ISO, which is already patched, with an XP install that required updates to be downloaded, and then complaining about the difference in speed. Yes, it's entirely possible to make an XP install zip right along... slipstream in updates, even program installs and configs, and you can be done in a comparable timeframe to a linux distro. I'm all for fair comparisons. The parent poster, however, wasn't making a fair comparison, and I was pointing out that flaw in his argument.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
It depends on how much advertising crap the company you bought the PC from loaded on your new box. Go purchase an HP or a Gateway and see how much horse shit is loaded on those machines. I've seen brand new $1,000 PCs run like 486s because of all the useless utility applications that no one wants like Norton's and AOL.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
God, you're killing me here! Take the knife out, man...
Look, all your objections to using flat files are straw man arguments. If I'm building an application and I want to set up a config file, it's trivially easy to set up an XML file, read it in and parse it. If I'm a halfway decent programmer, I'll be done in half an hour and it'll be perfect. What makes it much better than your registry is that my USERS can edit the file themselves, because I TRUST THEM. See, I'm from New York, not Redmond. A user who just gave me money for something is my brand-new Best Friend. He can do whatever the hell he wants with my project; hell, he can print out the code and roll around naked in it for all I care.
The POINT is, using a registry makes you a pain in the ass. Your user can't just copy your install directory to his new computer. He has to go through your buggy installer. He loses all his settings. And so on.
Using flat files means I'm NOT a pain in the ass. If one of MY users wants to copy my software to a new machine, he can just copy the directory and the config file over. Piece of cake, really.
It's really about being POLITE more than anything else. Don't you think?
NO CARRIER