Running PC Pro on Ubuntu: the verdict

Friday, February 11th, 2011

Yesterday, something remarkable happened. Our entire editorial team migrated to Ubuntu overnight and – by and large – it was business as usual. The website ran as normal, magazine copy was still written, we (just about) fulfilled our day jobs. (You can see how PC Pro’s Ubuntu day unfolded here.)

Several of the many excellent comments on yesterday’s live blog suggested our day-long experiment wasn’t a fair test; that no IT manager worth his space in the car park would migrate an entire office to a new operating system with almost no preparation or staff training. They were right. Yet what our somewhat reckless experiment revealed is that Ubuntu could cope. On a rag-bag selection of laptops and desktops, installed as a Windows “app”, a dual-boot or within a virtual machine, Ubuntu worked (sometimes at the second or third attempt) every time.

What our test also revealed is that the underlying operating system is becoming less and less relevant: what really matters are the applications. So much of our working lives are now spent in the web browser – updating the web CMS, scouring websites – that it really doesn’t matter if it’s Windows or Ubuntu propping the browser up. The Chrome and Firefox sync tools are so well implemented that you’re up and running with familiar bookmarks, extensions, search history and passwords within minutes.

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Live blog: running PC Pro on Ubuntu

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

To mark the Complete Guide to Ubuntu feature in the new issue of PC Pro – on sale today – we’re attempting to run our magazine and website on Ubuntu 10.10 for one day only.

Every website story and review we write, every email we send, every picture we edit will be completed on a PC running the popular Linux OS. Click here for full details of the challenge.

We’ll be updating this blog throughout the day with our experiences – good and bad – of running our office on Ubuntu. You can also follow our updates on the PC Pro Twitter account, using the #ubuntupro hashtag.

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Can we run PC Pro on Ubuntu?

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

On Thursday PC Pro is going to put its money where its mouth is. To coincide with the release of the new edition of PC Pro – which features our Ultimate Guide to Ubuntu on the front cover – we’re going to attempt to run the magazine and website exclusively on Ubuntu-based PCs*.

You can follow our live blog on running PC Pro on Ubuntu here

From 8am tomorrow, when the news team clock-in to bring you the early morning website news, to the time we switch off the last PC late in the evening, there won’t be a single blang of that Windows jingle heard here at PC Pro HQ.

Why? Over the past year we’ve been won over by the maturity, reliability and sheer quality of Ubuntu. Our recent Windows vs Ubuntu feature extolled the virtues of the Linux OS for business users, and the feature that goes on sale tomorrow reveals just how easy it is to install, configure and even run everyday Windows software on the cost-free OS.

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The PC Pro team is…. The A-Team

Friday, October 1st, 2010

At this week’s PC Pro Awards ceremony, we decided to give our guests a treat… by making blithering fools of ourselves.

Click on the video below to see the crime against light entertainment that we definitely did commit. (With all due apologies to George Peppard & co).

15 ways to keep up with PC Pro

Monday, July 19th, 2010

The PC Pro website isn’t the only way you can keep up to date with the latest news, reviews, features and opinion from the tech world. Here are some of the many ways you can keep in touch:

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The PC Pro Spotify playlist: the results

Friday, May 15th, 2009

You know it’s Friday afternoon when a hastily-written blog post asking for inspiration for PC Pro’s Spotify account gets nearly 20 responses before four in the afternoon. The result is a barkingly-mad list of music which takes in artists from The Beastie Boys to Tina Turner, and from Styx to Korn.

A quick reminder of the rules: all the songs had to have some connection to computers and they had to be found in the Spotify library. 

The winners are:

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20 good and 20 bad things about Twitter

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

PC Pro’s great Twitter adventure is barely a fortnight old (sign up for our Twitter feed here) but already we’ve found a great number of things that both amaze and annoy us about the micro-blogging site.

Here, in no particular order, are things we like, and can’t stand, about Twitter. Ideas suggested by others on the PC Pro Twitter feed and elsewhere are duly credited in brackets.

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What’s the point of Twitter?

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

We’ll throw our hands up. We just didn’t get it. Until now, Twitter has been largely regarded in the PC Pro office as Facebook status updates, without the rest of Facebook.  Or as Charlie Brooker put it in The Guardian this week: “a monumentally pointless ‘social networking’ thingamajig that lets you type 140-word ponderings or questions to an audience of other timewasters.”

But a few things have helped sway our opinion on this seemingly unstoppable internet phenomenon. First, our sister site IT Pro’s excellent guide to Twitter for business, which opened our eyes to some of the advantages Twitter has over Facebook, not least it’s potential reach.

As one of my colleagues noted when we were talking about this yesterday, Twitter is, if nothing else, an almost unrivalled internet broadcasting platform. Barack Obama (or more likely his flunkies) can post a tweet about his latest initiative, and a quarter of a million people will be instantly updated. Stephen Fry can get trapped in a lift and hundreds of people are sending him suggestions of how to pass the time.

Twitter’s also become a breaking news service. From planes doing a belly flop on to the Hudson River to snow falling in Scarborough, the first many people learn of the latest news events is a Twitter update. I learn from none-other than Guardian columnist and PC Pro contributor Jack Schofield’s tweet today that Twitter is now in the UK’s top 100 most popular sites, for example.

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I missed the meetings…

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Much as people may not believe me, us back-pages Beardies don’t get to see what’s in the rest of the mag until it hits our doormats. Really! It’s not just that we are halfway up a sheep, or Dibnahing about with our fleets of Crewe’s finest old english alloy: the way the mag comes together means that we have to deliver at a point when feedback is just too late, and certainly we can’t do cute things like comment on one another’s current columns, except during those odd periods when Honeyball and I start turning up like Lemmon & Matthau at Really Big Events.

So I’ve been noticing, like the rest of you, that the lining-up between contents in issues is getting more and more accurate. I was gobsmacked to find that the gnomes in the labs had gone Atom crazy, just as I was writing about what Atom is going to do to the marketplace in ‘09. So banish all thoughts of connivance from your minds. I don’t even have a poverty-model Eee to plaaay with…

(Oh, and any home proofreaders who snorted over the “quarter of a gigabyte” quantity on the last page of my column this month: it should say “quarter of a terabyte”).

Computeractive: an apology

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Yesterday, we ran a blog post suggesting that Computeractive may have gleaned the inspiration for its latest cover from a recently published copy of PC Pro.

Make your own mind up from the picture below:

Last night we received an email from the group publisher of Computeractive, reminding us that “scanning our cover falls into copyright infringement”.

We would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the publisher of Computeractive. Copying content from a rival publisher is, of course, utterly reprehensible.