The first steps.....

Something inside of me decided to move away from Ubuntu yesterday. Not because I dislike it, but I've been using it for so long now on my main machine (October 2004!) that I'd thought I'd give another distro a chance.

After a quick search, I decided on Suse. I wanted to go with a fairly main-stream choice (for reasons you'll see later), and mainly chose Suse because it was my first distro back in 1999 (I think version 6.1).

So, this blog is going to detail the results. I'm going to completely wipe my Ubuntu install to force me to work with Suse, and I'm going to try and get everything I can to work as I like it.

I typically use the computer for programming and internet use, and I'm also not keen on playing with lots of options. I rather the default settings 'just work'. My priorities are the following:

The internet must work (there is small annoyance on Ubunutu I'll detail later).
It must play my media files, which are a whole mixture on the video front but mainly mp3, shn and flac on the audio side.
3D graphics needs to work.
I program in Lisp, and I need SBCL + Emacs + Slime setup.
It needs to work with my video camera - a Panasonic SDR-H288, and my camera, a Kodak C743.

So I've just downloaded the Suse 11.1 Gnome Live CD. I'm now going to back up my data to an external hard drive, and then install it. Hopefully, the next blog post will be from Suse. If I blog from Ubuntu, then that's a fail; if I end up blogging from Windows then it'll be an epic fail (this laptop dual boots to keep the wife happy).