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Linux

Ubuntu Linux, Week 2

May 22, 2007

Welll, it’s not really week 2. I got the laptop a few days ago – but it was last week. I figured this was a good time to post an update, and complai… explain where I’ve gotten to so far.

I’m using it full time now, as my basic desktop. I’m reading email, posting blog entries, searching the web, working on presentations, etc.  I have definitely hit some points of pain in migration.

What’s fine:

  • The web was painless. I’ve been using Firefox for a long time anyway, and all I had to do was install a few extensions (and google sync, which rocks) and I was up and running exactly as I had been before. And since so much of my workflow is in Web2.0 apps, it all works great.
  • I had converted to IMAP a while back in preparation for this change, so all of my old mail and folders are now sitting on a server. Thunderbird is a bit different than Apple Mail.app, so it’s taking me a bit of time to get used to it.
  • Skype seems to work fine (I haven’t tried to make a phone call, but I usually use it for chat anyway, and it works fine for that.)
  • There are a lot of open source apps that I’ve already been using (XChat for IRC, Open Office, GIMP, Scribus) that work just the same, and can read and write all of the same docs I’ve been using.
  • I found some good screenshot software.

What’s been problematic:

  • Wireless networking – it took a bit of work to initially get it going, as I’d mentioned in my last post. Now, it seems to work fine – I’ve used it with two different open access points. I have yet to try it with a closed access point – I’ve heard that WPA can be problematic.
  • Video – the video resolution that the generic driver has is lower than the resolution that my laptop can use. I had to install new drivers, and, I have not yet gotten a configuration to work yet. I posted this plea to the techtalk list on Linuxchix. Hopefully I can find a solution.
  • For some really odd reason, Konqueror, the web browser that comes with Kubuntu, can’t see any external web sites. Every other program does fine (GAIM seems to flake out at times.) I haven’t solved it, and I hate Konqueror anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. But it’s quite odd.
  • Proprietary media doesn’t play by default. I totally get why this is true, and it’s not Ubuntu’s fault – it’s the fault of those who license the proprietary media. I wish everyone would just switch to Ogg Vorbis – it would make life easier. But, fat chance. So I’m having to download and install all sorts of strange stuff in order to play MP3s, Quicktime, etc. Installing Flash was kind of a pain, and I had to resort to the command line.

What’s unclear:

  • I haven’t done much with sound yet.
  • I don’t know what I’m going to do for an address book, and I don’t know how I’m going to get that to sync with my cell phone.
  • There are several key pieces of software that I use every day that I don’t know how I’m going to replace. They include the blog client, ecto – there really aren’t any good solutions for Linux. There are also Journler and Scrivener – two great apps for which there are no  Linux equivalents (actually, there are no Windows equivalents for these either.) There are also a whole host of tools and games I’ve gotten used to that there are likely no good replacements for at this time.

The bottom line – pretty much, if I were the type of person that did mostly email, the web and word processing, and the occasional spreadsheet or presentation, I’d be off and running, and doing just fine. And, actually,  I am off and running, and doing just fine. But if I hadn’t been so familiar with Linux, some of the stuff (like wireless) would have stymied me, if I couldn’t resort to the command line (Ubuntu doesn’t come out of the box with a decent wireless network application – if I were them, priority #1 for the next version would be seamless wireless, at least as good as is present in Mac and Windows.) I can’t blame them for the driver problem for my laptop, really.

But since I’m a power user, and have gotten used to Mac tools, which are great and user-friendly, it’s going to be a bit painful at times, I think. But I’ll be getting my work done, for sure.

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Linux, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, and Me

May 21, 2007

I’ve been a part of the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative for a long time, and I’ve been advocating for the use of open source software in the nonprofit sector for years. More lately, I’ve been working to focusing my advising practice on helping people implement open source software (mostly server-side) in their organizations, providing advice and training. I’ve installed more versions of varied Linux flavors than I could even think about remembering (going all the way back to the first or second versions of Slackware in the mid-90s). I’ve been responsible for administering many Linux servers over the years, some Red Hat, some Debian.

And, for all of that time, the Macintosh has been my primary desktop. I had a (very) brief flirtation with Windows (2000) as my primary desktop, but ever since 1987, when I bought my first computer (a Mac SE) I’ve owned at least one Macintosh. I’m not about to change that.

I’ve tried making Linux my primary desktop many times (5 at last count.) It was always something that got in my way of migration. In the beginning, it was lack of software (I first tried this back in 1999), or printer drivers. More recently (last time I tried this was back in 2004) it was not being able to sync with the palm treo I had at the time.

But, Linux has changed, and I have changed. And, in some ways, NOSI has changed – we’re thinking more and more about talking about Linux on the desktop, which we thought was not ready for nonprofit primetime for a long time. I think it’s ready now. I certainly will see. This is the 6th, and last time I will do this. Why last? Because I’ve decided that no matter what, I’m not going back. Because I want to understand, in the most personal possible way, what the pains (if any) of migration to an all free and open source platform will be.

So, I did some research, and realized that the best choice for me was to get a Thinkpad – most everything works right out of the box. I have been, unfortunately, a bit hampered by the fact that my satellite modem died last week – so we’ve been on dial up at home (and broadband at the “local” cafe). But here’s Ubuntu week 1, not edited or smoothed out. I’ll understand points of pain, for sure.

Week 1

I should have taken pictures – unboxing a new laptop is a lot of fun. I got a Lenovo Thinkpad Z61m. Good specs, cheap price. My first step was to make sure the laptop booted. It booted fine. I stopped at the license agreement. I popped in my Fiesty Fawn (Kubuntu 7.04) CD that I’d burned from a downloaded ISO, and rebooted. Once Ubuntu finished booting, I clicked the wonderful “install” icon at the top. Because the recovery media for this laptop was on the hard drive, and I also wanted to create a separate /home partition, I did a manual partition, deleting both partitions on the hard drive, and creating three partitions: /, /home, and swap. (I might regret hosing the recovery media w/o getting them on CD later, but I hope not – I was in a purist mood – I would have had to have agreed to the license agreement for Vista and activated the product in order to burn the media, and I wasn’t about to do that.)

A few minutes later, I had a Ubuntu install with KDE – but it was bare bones. The next step was to get online. That’s the first snag. Ubuntu doesn’t come default with an easy GUI way to connect to a wireless access point. I had to go command line in order to get online. I imagine if I was wired, it would automagically work (that’s been my experience in the past.) So I had to dig out of my memory (and do some online looking) about iwconfig. I also ran into a weird problem with a daemon called “avahi-daemon” which is basically the Linux implementation of “Bonjour”. I’m glad it’s there, but it mucked with my network, and it seemed strange that it was on by default.

So, I got on my wireless network, finally, and got online (I had to use a CLI tool called dhclient to get an IP address. That was annoying.)

So, so far, the major pain has been the wireless stuff. We’ll see how that works once I am able to download some of the good wireless GUI tools out there (like NetworkManager, which I hear is good.)

Next up, let’s see how the details of migration (web, mail, address book, etc. work.)

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Ubuntu open week

November 26, 2006

Next week is Ubuntu Open Week, a series of events and classes about Ubuntu Linux, and for people interested in getting involved in Ubuntu. The events are all on IRC (Freenode). I’ll be sitting in on a few, I’m sure, mostly for curiosities sake. Ubuntu seems to be becoming the linux distro of choice for a lot of people, and so far, it’s my favorite. Using Red Hat, as I often do sometimes, feels like doing battle in comparison. Ubuntu took the best that Debian had to offer, and left the weaknesses behind, I think.

Anyway, I think it’s worth checking out.

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Open Source News

November 19, 2006

Here are some tidbits from the open source world that might be of interest…

  • Sun makes Java open source. This is a big one. A few components (like the compiler javac, and others) have been open sourced under the GPL, with the rest of the SDK to follow next year. Find details at the Open JDK Project.
  • Make has a kit for an open source mp3 player. Yes, open source hardware. Cool!
  • This is old news, but I’m finally getting to understand it. Some really big 800-pound gorillas (Microsoft and Oracle) are bullying their way into the open source sandbox. The Oracle issue is much more straightforward – Oracle unveils “unbreakable Linux” – providing support for Linux that severely undercuts Red Hat’s support prices. There are some interesting theories afloat about this one (a ploy to then do a hostile takeover of Red Hat?) The second was the deal with Microsoft and Novell. Basically, they have agreed to collaborate on technologies and support. Here’s the kicker. Novell is paying Microsoft basically protection money. Microsoft agrees to give Novell customers indemnity against any patent or IP challenges. Eben Moglen thinks that this deal will be dead in the water because of the GPL 3.0. I’m not so sure, since no software project has to choose to adopt 3.0. It does mean that there will be a lot to watch in the next year or so.
  • After you camp out, and fend off the violent hordes to get your Sony Playstation 3 – you can boot linux on it.
  • Watch this documetary on Net Neutrality:

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Women and Technology

November 15, 2006

One of the things I really like about the nonprofit technology community is that there are so many women involved. There are lots of women on the varied lists I read, there are nonprofit technology organizations that have lots of women leaders, and all of that is great. But then, there is the little secret (well, it’s not so secret). When you look at systems administrators, or coders, or net-heads … the women kinda vanish. When it comes to conversations about things like the innards of APIs (REST or SOAP?), why Ruby on Rails rocks (or doesn’t), what’s a good alternative port to run SSH, when we’re going to implement IPv6 or … there’s a whole lot of testosterone, and not a lot of estrogen hanging about. So where did the women go?

As someone who was a real rarity in my early years (how many African American women neuroscientists have you heard of?) I didn’t ask this question too often (it would just depress me.) But as I re-enter this field I love, I can’t help but think about this question again.

This is why, by the way, I love hanging out with Linuxchix. This community has been around for a while, and its full of women who know their way around a linux kernel (some of them even get paid to hack it,) and can answer just about any question on Apache mod_rewrite I can come up with. There are some really great men who hang out too, who don’t mind being around a bunch of geeky women.

So maybe, we can get some Linuxchix to get involved in the nptech community, and we can get some nptech women who might be a little shy getting their toes wet with technology installing linux and writing code, with Linuxchix support, and have some nice synergy.

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Ubuntu

August 17, 2005

I’m trying Ubuntu Linux on an old compaq laptop I have (and brought with me to California.) It’s an old Compaq Armada (m300) that I bought used last year, and weighs about 2 pounds without the accessory bay. It was pretty cheap when I bought it, but it must have cost a fortune when it was new. I’ve installed regular Debian on it, plus a couple of versions of Fedora.

I’ve been hearing all sorts of good things about Ubuntu, and I figured it was time to try it out. Here’s my basic experience and review of it.

The most recent version of Ubuntu is 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). You can get it from their download page. They have regular ISOs, bittorrent files, and jigdo files. They’ve got some good mirrors, because the regular ISO download isn’t too slow.

I am intimately familiar with Debian, and Debian installs, but I’m going to write this as if I wasn’t – I think that would make it the most useful.

The first part of the install process (basic configuration, partitioning and base system install)  is very straightforward – there were few choices to make, the hardware was detected flawlessly, and the install went easily. I kinda went away after the first reboot, and was greeted with the login screen when I came back. No intervention was necessary. Easier install than Windows, I think.

A few things were a bit odd – for example there wasn’t a request for a root password – the default root password seems to be the same as the password for the single user account that was set up during install.

Gnome is the default desktop, and the only one installed by default – I’m a KDE fan. I switched my desktop environment in a way that I’m familiar with (install the kde packages, then change the default desktop manager in /etc/X11.)  Kubuntu, which is the sub-project to bring KDE to Ubuntu, seems really nice – and if I’d read the Kubuntu page first, I would have had an easier time switching to KDE.

The basic add/remove applications interface is nice, and the advanced panel has everything. The configuration editor is not really intuitive, but for those who don’t like the command line, it’s an improvement over basic CLI configuration.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu so far – the ease of install and configuration, matched with Debian’s ease of software update, etc. We’ll see how it works when I try to set up development environments (both Postgres/Perl and Ruby for Ruby on Rails) but I can’t imagine, given the Debian base, that I’ll run into trouble.

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