ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

Linux or Bust

Growing up, I managed to take advantage of my older brother's love of computing to get access to a few different computing platforms at a relatively early age. He's two years older, so I managed to play around with an ORIC and a Commodore 64 before I was 7. Our''80s computing experience was less "green screen" and more "16 colour TV screen".

For the majority of the '90s we had an Amiga 1200 that looked like it had been on Pimp My Ride. It had, amongst other things, a 50Mhz 68030 expansion card with 16 meg of Fast RAM, a 2.5 gig hard drive and a SCSI CD-ROM. Kickin'! This machine was powerful enough, and Amiga OS was cool enough, that we managed to avoid having a Windows box at home until 1998. We only picked one up after 3D video cards became standard, as they enabled Wintel boxes to finally start making games that could beat Super Stardust in the looks department. The fact that all of our University software ran on Windows helped inform the decision just a little, too.

This early avoidance of the Wintel market instilled a love of "underdog" computing platforms in me. Unfortunately this love has not previously resulted in me shifting away from Windows as my main home computing platform. I seemed to always have at least one machine running an alternative operation system, be it Linux, Mac OS, or even Amiga OS via WinUAE, but my primary machine has always been a Windows box.

My day job used to give me an avenue for exploring the "other side" of computing, as I worked in a fairly heterogenous environment with no preconceptions about what platform an application should run on. Choosing "the best tool for the job" was encouraged, so I got to play with some cool stuff. I would create applications in everything from PHP to C# to C++ to Java, all on a variety of different platforms. I can even remember running Redhat 8.0 for 6 months on my work laptop way back in 2002. Sure, I ended up doing a lot of stuff with remote desktop to some Windows development boxes running Visual Studio, but I got by.

Eventually my work drifted firmly into the Microsoft camp, and I swapped platform independence for the world of .Net/MS SQL Server based enterprise application.

After using Windows all day at work, I'd come home and use Windows on my personal machines. Home started to remind me a bit too much of work, and quite frankly I missed the whole "underdog" vibe I got from using a non-mainstream computing platform. So I did what any sensible person would do; I purchased enough components to build a quad core box with 4 gigs of ram and put Ubuntu on it.

Traditionally I would have installed Linux on an old machine and bought a new one for my windows desktop, but seeing as I planned on making Ubuntu the centrepiece of my home use I thought I'd better act like I meant it.

The switch was no where near as bad as I thought it would be. I managed to find replacements for most of the common software that I was used to on Vista, although I'm still very much in the evaluation phase for a lot of them. The important thing is that I was able to continue working in much the same manner as I did before, minus the chance of insane due to repeated exposure to the Windows login sound.

The operating system wasn't the only thing that was getting me down. I really wanted to do something that wasn't C# when I got home; I wanted to get back into dynamic languages and C/C++.

I had looked at doing Win32 C/C++, but there's just too much other junk getting in the way. I'm sure creating typedefs for everything under the sun does a great job of decoupling the code from the underlying type system, but it sure doesn't make for readable code. Plus there's the proliferation of double underscores. I HATE double underscores. There seems to be a lower barrier of entry to cutting useful C/C++ on Linux environments, especially if you're just looking at command line applications. gcc and glibc tend to "just work" in the most uncomplicated fashion possible.

Speaking of gcc, the fact that it supports so many languages is quite simply amazing. If the urge took me I could start cranking out ADA code again. Any ECU computer science students who did any part of their course in the previous century will know what I'm talking about. If it's good enough for the US Military then it's good enough for me.

If you want to do any dynamic language development then Linux seems to be where it's at, too. I'm primarily interested in Python and Ruby at the moment, although I wouldn't mind checking out PHP 5. I last looked at PHP in 2005 when the majority of hosts still had PHP 4.x installed, but the improvements in the OO features look really interesting. I remember writing an Active Record implementation in PHP 4.x, which seemed push it's OO capabilities to the limit.

Finding an equivalent web browser was a no brainer. I'm a Firefox user on all platforms. Ubuntu 8.04, the version I'm currently running after running through the painless update process from 7.10, even comes with Firefox 3 beta 4 installed by default. Whether or not this is a good idea remains to be seen. The default browser and the controversy surrounding the PulseAudio sound server have certainly made 8.04 an interesting release. I'm not a big user of Firefox extensions, so I seem to be avoiding most of the issues surrounding version 3.

IRC plays a rather large part in my computing life. It seems to have turned into the event organisation hub for most of my closest friends, so without it I'd probably have a much larger phone bill. I've always been a big fan of mIRC on Windows, but I've also been an XChat user since we bought our first Mac back in 2005. I've continued using XChat on Linux, and have been pretty happy so far. There are a few niggling issues, (such as having the specifiy the # when joining a channel, e.g. /join #mychannel as opposied to /join mychannel), but it's been a good experience overall. I haven't tried to create any scripts for it yet, but I'm sure it's Python interface must be better than the horrid "language" used my mIRC.

I used Picasa on Vista for photo management. I'm not a big retoucher, I just like to browse my photo libraries using a decent UI. There's a version of Picasa for Linux, but that's basically the Windows client running under WINE, which I'm not so keen on. I also took a look at DigiKam and F-Spot, finally settling on the DigiKam because my 5 year old was able to navigate our photo collection using it. This was a BIG plus for me. It's pretty cute seeing her flicking through old photos with her little brother on her lap.

I use GarageBand on an old G4 iBook and a souped up G4 PowerMac that I have lying around. The closest thing I can find to that on the Linux side is Audacity. I've used this on Windows before, so I was not expecting the world. I do have a POD 2.0 now, so real time amp modelling is less important to me than it used to be, so hopefully I can get something decent sounding out of it.

I never got into the whole "music management" software on Vista. I had iTunes installed, but I only seemed to use it for podcasts. I had taken to using Winamp or Media Player and just using my well organised file system to sort through my music. I decided to give Amarok a go on the Linux side, just to see if I had a use for a searchable music tool. The only problem I've run into here is that Amarok has trouble scanning a few files in my music repository. I've got a feeling that the problem is being caused by some MP3s I made using iTunes that came from GarageBand songs I'd created. Apparently iTunes doesn't "play nice" with it's MP3s. Regardless, the Amarok scan process isn't 100% working for me yet, so I have yet to experience the wonders of a fully searchable music library. Maybe when I get time to sort out the dodgy files I'll have the epiphany about my music collection that has been promised, but I'll reserve my judgement until then.

I'm a big fan of Outlook 2007. I use it at work, and I had it installed on my Vista machine. I use Gmail for all my mail, and I traditionally POPped it onto my Vista box (leaving a copy on the server so I could still read my mail on my N95 using the Gmail Mobile Client) and read my mail via Outlook. The logical thing for me to do would be to migrate all my mail to Evolution on the Linux machine, but I haven't done that yet. I've actually been giving the GMail web client a go. Conversation based email is certainly an interesting way of approaching correspondance, and the GMail Notifier certainly makes life easier. My PST may yet be migrated over to Evolution, but I'll give the web client some time to grow on me before attempting that.

I thought that the move to Linux would bring an inevitable move to OpenOffice , then I realised that I just don't use word processing and spreadsheet applications all that much at home. Probably the only time I'd fire up Word or Excel would be to make changes to documents from work, as I don't tend to create personal documentation using an office suite.

I've promised myself that I'll learn TeX, at the very least start using LyX to create TeX documents. I've always hated the style system of Microsoft Word (one of my pet peeves is the use of straight formatting in a Word document without the use of styles. Another is the odd situation where you can't make a particular style apply to a specific area of text in Word because it's confused as to where previous styles finish), especially compared to HTML/CSS, and TeX seems to offer a similar level of style/content seperatation. It remains to be seen whether or not I start producing documentation in this way, but it does feel wrong to make the shift to Linux and not at least try to use Don Knuth's labour of love.

Visual Studio has been replaced by KDevelop for C/C++ and Komodo Edit for Python, Ruby and PHP. Interestingly, ActiveState, the company that makes Komodo Edit and Komodo IDE, have created an open source effort around Komodo Edit called OpenKomodo. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet, but it's definately on my radar. I've also got Eclipse on there for checking out Java code. I gave the C++ features of Eclipse a go, but in the end I found KDevelop to be vastly superior.

I was already using Subversion for source control, primarily with TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN under Vista, so I've continued that practice on Linux. Considering I'm not doing any distributed development I've yet to jump on the Git bandwagon, no matter what Linus says. KDevelop integrates nicely with Subversion, and I'm using RapidSVN for general operations.

To be honest, I had delusions of granduer when approaching this project. I was all set to go back to non-IDE text editors, and was even planning on making the switch from my traditional text editor of choice, VIM, to Emacs. I even read most of the Emacs LISP manual in preparation, but the stories of RSI scared me off. Perhaps I was temporarily insane, but the concept did seem pretty attractive at the time. I'm still using VIM wherever I can, but I haven't gone so far as to start building an IDE out of it. Most of my actual coding gets done in one of the afformentioned IDEs.

Traditionally I've used Rational Rose, Sparx's excellent Enterprise Architect or even Visio for UML modelling. The closest thing I could find for Linux was a product called Umbrello. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with the Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil. I've only just started playing with this, but it looks promising. I'm currently modeling a small project using it, so I should know how good it is soon enough. I don't expect to have the traceability features of Enterprise Architect, but then what does? The Sparx product is one of those "great if everyone on the project is using it" tools that, if you stick to a certain methodology, give you some really cool results. I don't think I'll be needing anything of that scale for home projects, so hopefully Umbrello will suffice.

For image editing on Vista I had been using the excellent, and free, Paint.Net. The most obvious Linux equivalent is The GIMP. I've tried to use it before, but that was on Windows, where the GTK implementation doesn't exactly blend in with the native OS. The application menus are especially horrible to use, which is one of the reasons why I've never switched to Open Office on Vista. I've found that the application is much nicer to use on Linux where the widgets are native. Still, it's no Paint.Net. I'm still hoping that it will grow on me

I know that others have spoken highly of Paint.Net, but I cannot stress this enough: If you are running Windows and do anything with images then you need Paint.Net. Get it. Now!

After all this I still have VirtualBox running a Windows Server 2008 instance in seamless mode on one of my desktops. The good folks at Microsoft were kind enough to give me two enterprise licenses at the recent Heroes Happen event, so I thought that I'd put one of them to good use. I've got Visual Studio 2008 on there just in case the need hits me.

I honestly cannot heap enough praise on VirtualBox. For starters, the default packages just work with 64 bit Ubuntu, unlike VMWare. The UI is intuitive, and the seamless mode is great. The fact that it's cross platform means that I can now use the same virtual machines on my Linux, Vista and OSX boxes, which is also an amazing feature.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of the applications I've started using have been KDE native applications. I'm running KDE on my EEE PC, but my main desktop Ubunutu machine uses GNOME by default. I've never gotten into the whole GNOME vs KDE argument, and always tend to use whatever is installed on the system I'm using. Perhaps if choosing a windowing environment dictated the software I could install (e.g. if you couldn't run KDE applications on GNOME) then I'd put a lot more thought into it, but as it stands I really don't care enough to look into it. GNOME seems to just work, as does KDE. I'm not going to let something like the default menu or control panel stop me from enjoying my PC.

My experience in "switching" certainly hasn't been smooth sailing. In fact, several issues, such as multi monitor support, had me tearing my hair out. I've had so many issues that I could fill several posts alone just with those tales. But at the end of the day the experience of making the switch and using something which is totally outside the realm of what I do at work makes all the lengthy forum post reading sessions worth it.