{"id":940,"date":"2014-04-08T20:52:19","date_gmt":"2014-04-09T01:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/?p=940"},"modified":"2020-11-25T08:59:15","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T13:59:15","slug":"the-ex-xp-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/2014\/04\/08\/the-ex-xp-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ex-XP Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Being that it&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/windows\/enterprise\/end-of-support.aspx\" title=\"End of XP support\">XP End of Support Day<\/a>, I made sure this past weekend that there is no more XP in my home environment.<\/p>\n<p>I still have Windows 7 Ultimate on my trusty yet crusty <a href=\"http:\/\/www.notebookreview.com\/notebookreview\/dell-inspiron-9400-with-core-2-duo-and-nvidia-7900-gs-review\/\" title=\"Dell 9400\">Dell 9400<\/a> and Win7 Pro on Clare&#8217;s Lenovo SFF desktop, however the one remaining XP instance was the kitchen machine, a venerable <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/article2\/0,2817,1933653,00.asp\">IBM T60 Thinkpad<\/a> with 2G RAM.<\/p>\n<p>The kitchen machine is used for general web browsing, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Skype, RDP\/VNC client and sometimes playing music.  I needed all these things to work just as easily as before, including the cheap USB webcam and mic, and the wireless network.<\/p>\n<p>I installed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubuntu.com\/download\/desktop\" title=\"Ubuntu Download\">32-bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop<\/a> by downloading the ISO image to my Macbook Air and burning it to a DVD with my USB DVD drive, then booting up on the DVD.  I used all defaults except for system name.  When the system came up for the first time I used Firefox to download the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/intl\/en\/chrome\/browser\/\">Chrome<\/a> package, installed it with the package manager, and then did the same with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skype.com\">Skype<\/a>.  I used <a href=\"http:\/\/pidgin.im\/\">Pidgin<\/a> to connect to Yahoo Messenger.  In about 45 minutes and with a minimum of fuss, I had everything working.  I set up accounts for my family, connected to wireless, and left it on the kitchen counter.<\/p>\n<p>So far the only problem I have is that the video driver will only do 1024&#215;768 and not the full native 1400&#215;1050 that the T60 allows.  This is not a big issue since Clare and I both need reading glasses now.  Skype video is even clearer than it was on XP.  My daughter started playing music with Grooveshark and it just worked.  There are Office-compatible programs installed by default.  Remote desktop access works great for both RDP and VNC hosts.<\/p>\n<p>I heartily recommend Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Desktop as a great XP replacement with a fantastic out-of-the-box experience.  You may also want to try <a href=\"http:\/\/linuxmint.com\">Linux Mint<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Being that it&#8217;s XP End of Support Day, I made sure this past weekend that there is no more XP in my home environment. I still have Windows 7 Ultimate on my trusty yet crusty Dell 9400 and Win7 Pro on Clare&#8217;s Lenovo SFF desktop, however the one remaining XP instance was the kitchen machine, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=940"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":991,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/940\/revisions\/991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashleyit.com\/blogs\/brentashley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}