Switching to Linux

Zerobot developement is slowing down for a few days while I'm switching my main desktop environment from Windows to Linux. Ubuntu is great IMHO, no matter what Linus Torvalds says about Gnome. I even got the ATI driver working on my AMD64 PC finally (that's mostly what kept me on windows so far). The switch isn't that hard if you've used to multi-platform applications anyway (Firefox, Thunderbird, Eclipse, OpenOffice). Importing all my thunderbird settings and emails meant copying a directory from a windows drive to the linux file system. For eclipse, I din't use the packages provided by Ubuntu, but downloaded the Sun Java VM and Eclipse from the official sites. The GJC version was incredibly slower and ate lots of more memory.

So I already have three linux systems: coyote running on a Pentium 200 with no hard disk, booted from a floppy, shares the ADSL connection to my local network. Ubuntu 5.10 32-bit running on my old computer. And my new computer is dual boot -- WinXP and Ubuntu 5.10 64-bit. I think it will stay that way for I will still need Windows for playing games.

There's one thing I'd like to do before going full throttle with Zerobot developement: set up a server that not only shares the internet connection, but also acts as Apache, MySQL, file & print server + Bugzilla + CVS / SVN + phpBB2. Otherwise I have to keep synchronizing multiple desktop systems to provide up-to-date versions these services. I have a 450MHz Celeron that I could use for this, but I think I'll probably need to get a new hard drive for it. I'm planning on installing OpenSuSE 10.0 on it.