Transition 2012 Part 1: Reign of Lynx Review

It has been almost 2 year since the Lynx reigns my notebook. I like Lynx, it’s stable, fast boot-up, fast shut-down, easy to configure, etc. Lucid Lynx is an Ubuntu linux distro version 10.04. I use this system for my daily usage at home after work. Sometimes I use my home system to do my office work. In office I use Windows XP and Windows 7 system, and most applications that I use in office won’t be able to work in my linux system. So, I use virtual machine to do my work. In this case I use VMWare, instead of VirtualBox. There are several reasons why I use VMWare rather than VirtualBox. First, most of my colleague use VMWare; second, I feel VirtualBox is still unstable; and third, USB support in VMWare is better than VirtualBox.

In term of internet browser, I still prefer Firefox, it’s just because I feel more comfortable using it rather than other linux browser. Firefox supports many add-ons and plug-ins. Other than that, most of my bookmarks are in Firefox. Chromium is my second browser. Chromium is a good browser, the look is very simple, fast, and I can install chrome-based application.

In term of display, I have installed compiz and Avant Window Manager (AWN). The compiz allows me to run animation special-effect on my system. It’s really nice, even though I don’t set it at full capacity. While AWN allows me to show icon launcher on any side of the screen, but I prefer left-side. Below is a screen-shot of my compiz capability and AWN.

There are several applications that I use very often.

• Home Bank, a simple-personal accounting system, it tracks my income and expense, including my credit cards. I think it’s one of the best application for non-accounting person like me.
• GCStar is an application to store my movie collection. It’s able to retrieve movie information from the internet. The good thing of GCStar, it’s not just for movie, but can be used for book or music collection as well. A recommended application for collectors.
• SMPlayer is my most favourite movie player. It can run any movie format as long, as you have the codec, without a glitch.
• Disk Usage Analyser is an application that allows me to check how much space that my data has occupied my harddisk. It’s a default application from Ubuntu, but it’s very very useful. I think Windows system also need this application by default. By using this application, I can pinpoint which folder that has occupied my harddisk the most.
• Transmission is a downloader application with a torrent technology. Usually I use this application to download files from the internet. It’s very good, and it has never given me any problem.
• Terminal Server Client and TeamViewer are vnc-like application. I can use them to remote to a server or desktop and control them. They have helped me a lot to do my job.
• Geany is the best of the lightest IDE. It helped me a lot to do some programming works.
• Brasero is a DVD writer for Gnome. It’s an fine application. It can do the job, but sometimes it took almost an hour just to burn a DVD, and sometimes the result is not copied very well. If there is another DVD burner application, I’m willing to try it, as long as it’s a Gnome application.
• The last but not least is Wine, an application that allows me to run Windows application on my linux system, especially my games.  🙂

This Lynx is one of my best system of all. I still feel sad to overthrown Lynx from my notebook. But, I hope the next system, Pangolin, can give me a better performance than Lynx.

Thank you and good bye, Lynx.