How I got Linux back on my desktop

Roughly a year ago, Linux was no longer the primary OS running on my desktop. My daily computing has moved to my laptop, which has happily run Ubuntu for about a year now. However, after hearing news of improvements in the HP Linux print driver, it seemed I might be able to get Linux back on my desktop and still have the printer shared to the other Windows laptops around the house. Here's my checklist of features I needed that I've had setup in Windows for quite some time. Without all of the things listed, there'd be no hope of Linux staying on the desktop.

• FTP access
• Remote VNC access
• Network shares
• Print server
• Torrent web UI
• DNLA / UPnP media server
• Folding@home

FTP / VNC / Samba

Now, being Linux, some of these things are available right off the line. Thanks to the Synaptic Package Manager and a couple quick google queries, it wasn't long before FTP, VNC, Samba, and SSH daemons were up and running.

The Printer

Next up was the big hurdle of sharing the HP PSC 1210xi printer. I simply couldn't get this working last March with Edgy Eft. But with a quick search on google, I found a solution to my problem that was so simple it was almost silly. The printer always shared fine from Ubuntu, but Windows just couldn't connect to it because of the truly cumbersome drivers provided from HP. It turns out that you can connect to the printer from Windows by using any generic HP driver. Once the printer is installed, go to the advanced printer properties and select the proper "PSC 1200 series" driver that Windows now magically recognizes. After that, networked printing worked like a charm!

Torrent Web UI

Not long ago, an easily installed web UI to a bit torrent client wasn't too likely. Fortunately, my favorite Linux bit torrent client Deluge added a web UI plugin. Activate the included plugin after installing the .deb from their site and you're ready to go.

DNLA / UPnP

I had serious doubts an open source solution for streaming audio/pictures/videos to my Playstation 3 from my desktop existed. However, Fuppes turned out to be the perfect solution. The Fuppes wiki includes instructions for installing everything in Ubuntu, making everything a cinch. If you plan to stream to the PS3, make sure to check the wiki for specifics on how to handle certain AVI transcoding.

Folding@home

I've taken an interest in contributing to the Folding@home project. I've had the F@h client running on my desktop in Windows, so I wanted to continue in Linux. The Ubuntu wiki has a great tutorial and I personally used the finstall option which worked perfectly.

After only a couple days of setup, my desktop now handles everything I need thanks to free and open source software.