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

As previously blogged my wife bought me a Slim Aluminum Apple Keyboard which I’ve been slowly configuring to work with Ubuntu and now I believe I’ve gotten a sweet configuration, to the point where I’m now more comfortable with my Apple keyboard than the standard Dell keyboard I use at work.

Initially there were a couple of quirks about the Apple keyboard under Ubuntu. I’ve only used this under Interpid and Jaunty. I believe that there are some basic issues with this keyboard in Hardy due to the version of the kernel it’s running.

Let’s begin. Firstly the keyboard function keys only worked when the Fn key is pressed. Ideally I’d rather press the Fn key to access the extra function like Brightness, Volume, etc. The solution is really simple. Add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/apple_kbd.conf.

Intrepid:

options hid pb_fnmode=2

Jaunty:

options hid_apple fnmode=2

Now run the following command to make this change persist across reboots.

sudo update-initramfs -k `uname -r` -u

Reboot to take effect.

The second problem was a little more confusing. Basically the Apple keyboard doesn’t appear have a # key!

Hint: It does, it’s just not printed on the key.

I initially installed Ubuntu with the United Kingdom keyboard. So the following are the steps I followed to allow me to overcome this issue …

1. Select System > Preferences > Keyboard
2. Go to the Layouts tab
3. Click Add…
4. Under the By country tab I chose Country: United Kingdom and Variant: United Kingdom Macintosh
5. Click Layout Options…
6. Under Miscellaneous compatibility options, select both Default numeric keypad keys and Numeric keypad keys work as with Mac
7. I then removed the old United Kingdom keyboard layout.

Now with the new United Kingdom Macintosh layout enabled you can get a # symbol by pressing Right-Alt + 3. You can now also get the € symbol by pressing Right-Alt + 2

That’s it.

Downtime

For about a month this site has been down. I host this website from my home cable connection and the PC it was running on developed several hardware problems and died. No data was lost because I had/have up-to-date backups. you can never be too careful ! So I used this opportunity to redistribute the hardware I had remaining amongst my 3 main PCs (Tyr, Thor and Loki) and retired several lesser spec’d PCs.

Upgrades

Loki

My Media Center was way over spec’d for my needs and so I wound up switching the motherboard/CPU/RAM/GPU with Tyr. I’m still using Windows Media Center 2005 because the rest of the family want TV and I’ve yet to have time to check out  Mythbuntu; so it’s Windows Media Center 2005 until then.

Thor

This Pentium 4 box had it’s RAM and hard drive upgraded as I’m going to use this machine as a VPS Host. I’m currently setting up OpenVZ on there, under Hardy, to consolidate the tasks several PII/PIII machines were doing, although I may try XEN.

Why OpenVZ/XEN? I know the officially supported Virtualization  software in Ubuntu is KVM, but this machine can’t run KVM (CPU is too old). I’m not bothered about using a GUI to administer an Ubuntu Server,  I can do everything I need from the commandline as all good server administration should be done.

The 4 machines I’m currently replacing are …

1. An SSH server – To tunnel traffic securely when I’m away from home.  (OpenSSH)
2. A Web Server – To host this site and  a secure site to hold my photo album. (nginx, mysql, PHP5)
3. A File Server – To host the backup shares used by my wife and myself. (SAMBA)
4. Source Control – To hold my source securely and under revision control.

I know it’s probably overkill to set each of these up as a separate VM but with 2 of them being exposed to the internet 24/7 I don’t wish to expose my personal data as well so I figured I may as well run them all as VMs. One feature of OpenVZ, which I prefer to XEN, is if I login into the Host I can easily backup the files within the VMs without having to log into each VM separately. This is because OpenVZ uses directories not hard disk files to store each VM. One simple Bash script later and cron is merrily backing up each VM.

Tyr

I’ve finally got this one up and running with Jaunty. I set it up as follows …

• 250Mb – ext2 – /boot
• 10Gb – ext4 – /
• 10Gb – ext4 – /home
• 460Gb – ext4 – /media/data

I’ve used XP Pro (just to test the difference between XP and Ubuntu), Intrepid Ibex and now Jaunty Jackalope on this system. I installed each OS and timed it then I optimised each one as best I could. At best this machine takes 70 seconds to boot to a desktop (via autologin) with Intrepid and over 2 minutes to boot to a desktop (via autologin) with XP Pro SP3! However under Jaunty (RC I might add) it boots to a desktop (via autologin) in 20 seconds flat and it’s ready to use straight away, no speed tweaking required. I had to switch it off and  on 3 times, and timed it booting again each time, just to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. This is brilliant, a big, big “Thank you” to everyone who made this possible. Launching applications is lightning fast and everything just feels incredibly responsive.

It’s nearly a year since I stopped using Windows on my home PCs (Media Center excluded because that only shows/records TV and plays DVDs) and after the quick comparison I did on this machine I don’t think I’ll be needing Windows on my desktop for a long, long time (if ever).