alan doyle

As everyone and their dog knows Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released today. I’ve been running Karmic on my Samsung NC10 Netbook since Alpha 2 and, with the exception of the small hiccup with Network Manager (Bug 427400) I’ve not had a single issue. It’s been rock solid now for over 4 months. Quite simply this is the best release to date. It’s the little things which make it feel a more mature release. Simple things like including the GTK2 version of PuTTY, the new wallpapers, the new GDM and the more polished look-and-feel of GNOME in general.

Also during this release I’ve been trying out KDE as a serious desktop for the first time ever. I never like the 3.5 series and when version 4 came out I thought it looked brilliant but defaulted to non-aliased fonts and had a few too many crashes for my liking but 4.3.0 in Kubuntu 9.10 looks and feels awesome. Kudos to the guys and gals on the Kubuntu Team and KDE Upstream. I’ve installed it on my main desktop and plan on using it there as my main desktop until Lucid to try to decide whether I prefer GNOME or KDE. Time will tell…

WARNING: Personal opinions abound …

After all the furor about Microsoft contributing 20,000 lines of code to Linux and Microsoft’s “Community Promise” regarding C#, a language I use professionally, I recently read this article and I have to agree with Linus, in particular “I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.”

Open Development were everyone is welcome, no matter who you are or who you work for, is the main reason I love the open source world. As a professional programmer I’m bound by “Trade Secrets”, NDAs, and closed source software. I realise there is a business need for such things yet even still we can deploy Linux servers and rely on the open source world to help us provide the best we can for our customers.

I’m not going to make any judgements as to whether Microsoft’s intentions are good or bad, I will say this being able to write C# at work on Windows XP and come home and continue to write it on my Ubuntu PCs is brilliant, that is the true beauty of open source. I personally prefer Ubuntu to any of Microsoft’s Operating Systems, even Windows 7, and  keeping my professional skills up to scratch is a priority.

So, until such time where all the nay-sayers triumph, please enough with the Microsoft bashing and the Mono slating, it’s not clever and not very productive. Open source lets many people, like myself, work freely and professionally on the Operating System of their choice.

… I’m sticking with Ubuntu.

Recently I’ve been trying out Windows 7 RC on my Samsung NC10 netbook, mostly out of curiosity. I have to say after being unimpressed with Vista it’s not bad. It’s new taskbar reminds me a lot of KDE 4, Aero Peek, Aero Shake and Snap are quite nice and the fact it was able to install drivers for all the NC10 hardware, even if some are quite basic. All-in-all it’s quite pretty.

Installing all the software I prefer took an awful long time. Finding the official websites, downloading the installers and finally running the installers. Compared to simply issuing an apt-get command this is hell.

After a few weeks of using Windows 7 as my main OS on the netbook I can honestly say I won’t be switching to Windows 7 any time soon. In fact now that I have tried it I want to wipe my netbook and try Alpha 3 of Karmic on this little netbook and see how she flies. I love the power and freedom that Ubuntu has to offer in automating daily tasks and neither the Command Prompt, PowerShell nor Scheduled Tasks can offer me the flexability, simplicity or power of bash and cron!

I’m pretty convinced now that Windows no longer has the features I require from an operating system and I’m happy I made the switch to Ubuntu over a year ago.

Aside: If you’ve got an NC10 then a good guide to update the drivers and software on the NC10 can be found on Ade Millers blog.

One year ago, today, I started upon a journey. A journey which really opened my eyes to the true possibilities of the Open Source Desktop. I was a little apprehensive but determined. I had used Linux on servers for over a decade and played with various versions of Linux on the desktop but never really found one that fit my needs or worked with all my hardware. I had played with Ubuntu as a desktop OS since Hoary (5.04) but never really committed to using it full-time. It was a pleasant distraction but mostly I stayed with XP as my Desktop OS. I must thank Microsoft for Vista because without Vista I fear apathy would have kept me playing with Linux as a Desktop OS but I probably wouldn’t have made the decision to change.

In the beginning …

Even though I’m a Software Developer by trade I don’t have any major requirements for my Desktop OS. At work I use Visual Studio 2005 to develop MFC/C# applications but I no longer wrote any Windows software at home, I mostly do web application development, for myself, with object-orientated PHP.

My requirements are:

• Email – Evolution works well with “Google Apps for my Domain”. I also tried Thunderbird but I’m waiting for the final version of 3.0 before I decide for good whether to use Evolution or Thunderbird full-time.
• Web Browsing – I’ve been using Firefox on Windows since v0.4 (Phoenix) so that was a no brainer.
• Office – OpenOffice works beautifully for my needs and imported the few Word Document and Excel Spreadsheets I had.
• Music – My wife bought me an 8Gb iPod Nano for my birthday last year so I was a bit worried I’d still need iTunes ( I don’t buy music online I prefer CDs, so all my music were plain old MP3s). I found Rythmbox worked beautifully, although I’m tempted to try Songbird or Banshee.
• Basic Image Editing – I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro 7 for ages to edit/organise my photos. This worked beautifully under Wine but lately I’ve been finding myself using GIMP/F-spot more and more so I may retire PSP7 soon.
• Web Design – I’d been using Dreamweaver MX 2004 for all my Web Development on Windows and found it to ran perfectly under Wine, when I installed MDAC 2.8 as well. However I recently discovered Geany and I’m quite impressed with its capabilities.

I had planned on installing VirtualBox, VMWare or KVM to run a Windows virtual machine for any software I couldn’t find satisfactory replacements for and one day I may actually get around to it

As time progressed …

When October came around I upgraded to Intrepid and was blown away at the simplicity of the upgrade. Hardware came and hardware went during this time and I’m now down to 3 main PCs and a Media Center box. Over this time I became less worried about whether my hardware would work with Linux and more interested in “What else can I do with Linux?”

Now

I’ve recently upgraded my Desktop and Netbook to Jaunty and all I can say is “Wow!”. I’m blown away at how fast it is and just how easy it is to work with. This is how computing should be. I’ve also replaced several older Pentium III PC’s running various tasks about the house (and running various versions of Windows and RedHat), which I’ve donated to friends with Ubuntu installed, with a single Pentium IV running OpenVZ on a Hardy Server. It rocks. I’ve even put together some shell scripts to help me administer this box easily and a little website in the host OS, using nginx and PHP in Fast-CGI mode, to show some details of the VMs. All the while Cron happily backs up each VM nightly and Postfix is configured on each VM to send mail via “Google Apps” if it has any issues. I haven’t had this much fun with computers since I stopped tinkering with my Amiga 1200!

The future …

Next project is to convert the Media Centre box which is still running Windows MCE 2005. I haven’t had time yet to try MythTV, FreeVo or MyMediaSystem yet … I would like to use Entertainer, XBMC or Elisa but I need to be able to view and record analog TV, not that I get to watch that much TV anyway with 2 young daughters!

And finally …

All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Ubuntu exclusively and I am loving it!

As previously blogged I surf the web a lot on my Nokia N95 and hate the fact most websites don’t include support for mobile web browsers. I also felt guilty because this very website was also commiting the same sin. But not any more. Courtesy of MobilePress plugin for WordPress this blog is now mobile friendly. I can now rest a little easier as I rewrite this site to use my own CMS system (which will be mobile friendly) as I’ve much bigger plans for this site other than just my blog