I am working on updates to my tutorials and further developments which I hope to publish before Christmas.

Hopefully I’ll see you soon.

To obtain and install Debian, see the installation information page and the Installation Guide. To upgrade from an older Debian release, see the instructions in the Release Notes.

On a side note I’ve been using Squeeze on my Viglen MPC-L for quite some time now and it’s proven to be a very light and stable release. At least they still support i586 hardware. I’ve just inherited an old Packard Bell EasyNote laptop (K6-2 550MHz with 256Mb RAM) so I guess I’ll be Debianising that this weekend.

Many thanks again to all the guys and girls who’ve made Debian 6.0 a reality.

In short … Yes.

It turned out to be incredibly simple to tether a Nokia 5800 to Ubuntu 10.04

1. Make sure Modem Manager is installed (sudo apt-get install modemmanager)
2. Connect the phone via USB to the PC.
3. Set the Nokia to “PC Suite” mode.
4. Left click on the Network Manager icon and choose “New Mobile Broadband Connection”.
5. I then chose the recommended values in the wizard.
6. Success. I can now choose the “Virgin” entry and I’m online via 3G.

Yet another example of how simple computing with Linux, especially Ubuntu, has become. In fact this post was written and published via the 3G connection as a “proof of concept” use.

As a side note I also recently wiped my netbook clean, I had it dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10, to being an Ubuntu only install, I usually wait until the Beta is released before upgrading but I wanted to experience firsthand the re-branding everyone has been talking about on the Planets. I have to say I love it. Fresh. Clean. Professional. It’s certainly come a long way since Breezy.

Update: Added a step to ensure Modem Manager is installed courtesy of info provided by Ralf Hildebrandt below.

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…

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.

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.

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!

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.

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).