As I said in a previous article I have often toyed with the idea of making a full move across to Linux for my work and personal machines. There are many reasons I would like to make this switch, with the primary one being my resentment of Microsoft.

Although my dislike of Microsoft is great, I am still not the type of person who will cut off my nose to spite my face, by which I mean I will only make the full switch to Linux if as a result of that switch my productivity is increased, or at the very minimum remains the same.

So I set myself the challenge to try and install all of the software which I use on a daily basis on some flavour of Linux on my personal laptop. If I am successful in this, then I will also move across my work machines.

For this process to be considered a success I have to install or substitute with suitable replacements the following programs for general use:

• Microsoft Office

• Skype

• Outlook

• Firefox

• AVG

Also I will need to install the following programs for work use, these items cannot be substituted for suitable alternatives as their use is company policy:

• Eclipse IDE with the PHPEclipse and Aptana plugins

• ESRI Arc Map

• Opera and Internet Explorer (I'm a web developer!)

And finally I will need to be able to complete the following tasks:

• Connect to my office Gigabit network

• Connect to my home wireless network

• Mount the samba share drives from our office Slackware testing server

• Connect via SSH to out dedicated server in the U.S.

Additionally I would like to do the following although they are non-essential:

• Install Windows XP and our custom Slackware OS using VMWare.

• Install Macromedia Flash and Fireworks using WINE.

Over the next few days I will be keeping a diary of my progress on getting this up and running on my IBM T43 Thinkpad. I have decided to go with Ubuntu for my Linux flavour mainly out of curiosity,. Some people are quite evangelical about their flavour of Linux, I personally like to choose what I feel is the right tool for the job. I have previous experience with Slackware, Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora, all of which I have found to be solid operating systems but are never likely to take on Windows when it comes to home users.

Ubuntu has been receiving a lot hype with people even speculating that this could be the flavour of Linux that finally breaks out into the mainstream, thanks to its ease of use. So I've just got to check it out and see if it lives up to that hype.

Stay tuned!