Lets face it, the grass is always greener on the other side. Whether its moving jobs, houses or operating systems, people are always lamenting their present situation and looking for changes. That’s natural human behavior. Mix that with the other human trait “procrastination”, and you have a lot of people who are unhappy where they are but refuse to move on.

There may be a lot of reasons why people need to change, but there are always more reasons to delay the change as much as possible. We tend to get comfortable living with the inadequacies of our current situations and finding workarounds to get things done. While at the same time we complain about how our current world can be a whole lot better. Funny thing is that it can, but putting a change into what we perceive as a working environment, can be like jumping off a bridge.

If you want to move jobs or houses, its very much a situation where you cannot revert back if things go bad. IE, you’ve jumped off that bridge and now find yourself in a whole new environment from which you have to learn your “workarounds” all over again. And face it, there will never be a perfect environment where you won’t have to make any changes at all. Every change brings with itself some joy and some regrets. Its in our nature to miss what we no longer have even if we changed willingly.

Thank god its not the same for operating systems. Technology these days allow us to experiment with different operating systems all the while having a back up ready to revert back to if you don’t like what you see. It gives us the opportunity to leap over the fence and truly see if the grass is greener.

We as users are spoilt for choices. With the latest builds of Linux and Windows coming out and developers listening more and more to their followers, the quality of operating systems are increasing with every release. With that comes better application interfaces that allow developers to create amazing software.

There are alternative application solutions to practically every software out there. See my post on alternative applications for Linux as an example. Also, check out http://alternativeto.net/ if you want to see alternatives for Windows and Mac based software.

People can also dual/tri boot or use Linux Live CD’s or use Virtual Machines to experience other operating systems. We’re truly spoilt.

With so many choices available as well at the ability to revert back, I still see many people wanting to go one way or the other. So, its either Windows or Linux but not both. People gravitate towards the two extremes and always looking to get rid of one or the other.

I am happy.. in both the Linux and Windows worlds. I can honestly say I’ll never get rid of Windows. Applications like Adobe Photoshop and Windows Live Writer while having alternative solutions, will never be replaced in my toolbox. They have become a staple part of my daily user experience and I cannot see that changing in the near future. However, it will always allow me to play with other software knowing I have those as my “back up”..

As long as we have a choice to come back, we will continue to experiment and will eventually change on our own. We don’t need to be pushed, coerced or actively look for a reason to change. That will come naturally.

Its important that people continue to have choices and our need for change will always result in corporations striving to ensure that we all have quality user experience. And that is something to look forward to.

If you have installed Linux (any format) onto your machine, either standalone or as part of a dual boot system, you would have seen the GRUB menu pop up. This screen usually appears when you start your machine and offers you a choice of operating system to install.

Sometimes, you may want to hide this menu (ie, go straight to the login screen) or show it if it is hidden or change the amount of time it stays up.

This article shows you how to change the above parameters. While you can use packages such as "start up manager" to do your changes, I wanted to edit the configuration files manually just so that we can get a bit of practice on how to use the terminal window and editing text files :)

Before we begin, a warning please:

Be very careful when you are making changes to this file. It is possible that if you accidently overwrite, or delete lines in here, your GRUB menu may get corrupted. So follow the instructions carefully.

How to Show or Hide the GRUB Menu in Ubuntu Linux:

In order to do this, log into your Linux sytem (We’re using Ubuntu here so our text editor will be gedit. For others, it may be nano or vi, etc) and open up the terminal window.

Step 1 – click on Programs –> Accessories –> Terminal Client. A window will open up.

Step 2 – type in the following and hit enter:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

You will get a password prompt. Enter your root password here. This is the password you would have set up when installing the system and is also known as the admin password.

The command sudo simply gives your administration rights as the file you will be editing is a "system" one.

Once you have entered the password correctly, your text editor will open up as below:

Step 3 – scroll down the page until you see the following section:

     ## hiddenmenu
     # Hides the menu by default (press ESC to see the menu)
     hiddenmenu

To show the GRUB menu, put a “#” in front of the third line.. The “#” means that that line will be ignored by the application and so the line is not run and the menu is not hidden.

To hide the GRUB menu, ensure that the third line above doesn’t have a “#” in front of it.

Step 4 – Save the file and close the text editor. Reboot your machine and the menu should appear (or not) based on your settings above :)

How to change the timeout on the GRUB Menu

Right, so we may have the menu appearing, but (if you are like me), you may wish to change the amount of time it stays up before it chooses the default OS.

Lets start. Do Steps 1 and 2 above again. So we start with you on Linux having your menu.lst file open in a text editor.

Step 3 – find the following line in the window:

## timeout sec
# Set a timeout, in SEC seconds, before automatically booting the default entry
# (normally the first entry defined).
timeout 30 <— the number here may be different

Step 4 – the number after the “timeout” line (fourth line above) dictates that amount of time in seconds the menu will stay up for. Feel free to change that number to something larger or smaller depending on your requirements.

Step 5 – Save the file, and exit the text editor by closing the window. Feel fee to close the terminal window too.

Thats pretty much it. Reboot and the GRUB menu should now be shown for as long as your defined it

Note: putting a “#” in front of the “timeout 30″ line will comment it out and not make it run. This will mean that the computer will not choose any default options and will wait for you to choose one before loading. Effectively removes the “timeout”.

Well, the experiment with DreamLinux didn’t last for very long. While the install went well, I found the following issues around getting it to work with my Dell 9300 laptop:

• The wireless network drivers didn’t work off the install – i had to use ndiswrapper to load up the windows version of the wireless adapter’s drivers.
• World of Warcraft didn’t work with Wine. That was pretty much the deal breaker for me. While others may have got WoW to work successfully with DreamLinux, I unfortunately couldn’t make it work – even after trying numerous suggested solutions.
• The XFCE windows manager, while being good and lite, was just a bit too different for my liking. I am just not used to the button placing and the windows elements seem to be floating in the windows.

In the end, i knew i had to go back to Gnome as my main environment. Back to Distrowatch and onto Linux Mint I went..

The good news is that, the install went perfectly, the wireless drivers were detected and installed, the updates all happened correctly and to top it off, World of Warcraft runs swimmingly on it :)

Running at a native resolution of 1900×1200 using the latest proprietory nvidia drivers, the performance of WoW under Wine was excellent. While the frame rate did fall a bit in the newer (more system hungry) zones, it was still quite a bit better than under Ubuntu.

I’ve now got the system running pretty much as i wanted it with the last thing left to install being the VPN connections to my work machine :)

It looks a little different then Ubuntu and provides what i would consider a slightly more superior "start" button.

Adding additional software etc was as easy as always and Mint comes with its own selection of tools to simplify the process even further.

One thing to note though is that Mint has built a custom search tool in Firefox that replaces the default search tool. This is to generate some much needed revenue and i do support this. However, the custom search doesn’t give the user the ability to search images, etc.. However, there is a link on the Mint forums to remove this custom search and replace with the more familiar Google, yahoo etc search. I would suggest leaving the custom search there though as we all need to support these people who have put in so much of their valuable time.

The forums themselves are quite busy (good sign) and the people are generally helpful.

Relevant Links:

Main Page

The Linux Mint Forums

The Linux Mint FAQ’s

Firstly, many of my family members or friends are not completely computer savvy and tend to collect all manner of nasty malware etc during their newbie browsing.

I have gotten tired of reinstalling windows every time they have an "issue".. over the last few months I’ve taken to re-educating them not just on safe browsing but also giving them a choice of OS’s to install. This is particularly the case where their Windows XP cd comes on a CDR..

A friend of mine even had a TradeMe (kiwi version of eBay) transaction with a reputable dealer who gave him a system with a hacked version of Windows Vista installed on it (and called it "installed for evaluation purposes, so please delete after you have evaluated it") – damnit.. that sucked as we couldn’t even go to Windows Update from that copy.

Soooo, nowadays whenever one of the newbs screw up their PC (and they do.. often).. I suggest installing Linux on it instead. This has brought about quite a bit of happiness actually, for as good as Windows is (and i do think its good), when it comes to Linux vs Pirated Windows, i see no other alternative.

The main gripe they usually have is with "oh what about my hacked version of Office? or *insert any other windows app here*? The good news is that Linux has quite a lot of alternative applications that can be used instead of the native Windows ones.. (and yeah, taking them through Wine would have been a mission).

I’ve collated a quick few links below to point to some of the sites out there that lists these alternatives.. quite comprehensive really :)

See below:

• The Linux Alternative Project – a good site with many alternative applications for common windows applications. They even have a forum that can lead to even more alternatives.
• Osalt.com – Open Source as Alternatives – not strictly Linux, but open-source alternatives to commercial applications.
• The top 50 proprietary programs that drive you crazy and their open-source alternatives – another pretty good site.. huge list!

There are a lot more sites like above.. those i just picked within a few minutes of searching and browsing.. :)

So, after months of Ubuntu on my Dell 9300, and running World of Warcraft under Wine, I finally decided that Ubuntu was a little to heavy on my cpu and started looking at alternatives.