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Apr
21
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Weekend blogging is becoming a bit of a habit lately - I'm working on a couple of hush-hush projects that converge around JavaOne so things are getting a little hectic. That by the way was an understatement - the English do that all the time. For example Scott (the Antarctic explorer) would probably have described the deadly conditions at the South Pole (had he found it) as a "tad inclement".
Anyway, a busy week interrupted by a quick trip to LA didn't leave much time for reading blogs; let alone actually writing any - so here I am again at the breakfast table scribbling down a few thoughts. O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo. was last week - I did intend to go along for half a day but never got there - I'm sure there's a whole bunch of news to catch up on.
One bit of news I did see was that Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) is out - I'll either resuscitate an old machine or install Parallels and try it out - It'll be interesting to see to what degree they are closing the gap on Mac OS/X. The real news, however, is that Ubuntu now includes the full Java software stack - including GlassFish, JavaDB, NetBeans and Java SE. A good arrangement all round. That's an understatement by the way.
Read more about that news on the Tom Marble's blog, the Aquarium and on John Clingan's blog. By the way - John has chosen a great time to become the Product Manager (or should that be Community Manager) of GlassFish - things seem to be panning out pretty well. That's another understatement.
Until next weekend !
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Mar
25
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I've been a Mac user for a week now; actually 1 week and 10 minutes if you include the time spent with the original MacBook that was pretty much DOA. It's taken me the best part of the week (in between work) to actually get everything set up and working. Those things FWIW are : Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Palm Desktop and Open Office - that's basically my office productivity suite.
Things I like :
Keyboard - very good feel, quiet and fast. As an added bonus it lights up - should I ever feel the need to type in the dark !
Desktop - very slick, quick and customizable. I didn't like the vanilla look and feel so changed all the icons, modified most things to my liking. It's good you can do this.
Stuff works - always a problem with Linux (even Ubuntu) was getting APM, Wireless, etc. to just work. All the time. With the Mac I just don't find myself having to massage things all the time. Open the lid, do some work, surf the web, close the lid. That's the way a laptop has to be.
The scroll button on the Mighty Mouse (but see below).
The magnetic power jack. I don't know why but I just can't help fiddling with it. Magnetism is neat.
Things I don't like
OpenOffice on OS X is a bit of a hack - it runs inside X11 and doesn't do much / anything to adopt the OS X look and feel or keyboard shortcuts. I rely on the keyboard more than a mouse (having grown up on X-emacs) and having to switch between OS X and X11 slows me down (eg. copy & paste - which I use about 30 times a minute !). At the moment it's manageable but this is the kind of irritation that will probably wear me down.
There's no virtual desktop !! I did try something I found on the web but it didn't work. How can anyone work without a virtual desktop !
The mousepad button is raised about 1mm - I don't know why - it seems like a bug.
The Mighty Mouse "side buttons" require a pretty unnatural squeeze - I'm getting the hang of it but I've had better mice with way more buttons and they've not felt quite as awkward.
Things that are different, but I'll probably get used to.
There's only one mouse button. Many would argue there's no need for more than one. Unfortunately my hand doesn't care - it expects 2 buttons.
The Mac Button.
Overall I'm pretty pleased - It hasn't taken me long to get up to speed and with only a few mishaps along the way - I somehow corrupted my original login and had to create a new one and copy all the files over. As an added bonus, the kids like Photo Booth. This week I'm traveling so I'll see how the MacBook deals with that.
Update
I just enable track pad clicking (and double clicking) so I'm happy there - thanks Max.
I just downloaded Desktop Manager - pretty sweet and it should tide me over 'til Panther - thanks Mozam.
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Jan
29
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Tim Bray is looking to switch from Mac OS/X to Linux on his laptop. Some good comments on his blog about sourcing a laptop vendor that will pre-install Linux. I haven't looked for a while but when I did a couple of years ago - your choices we're pretty limited - you'd end up with a gawky looking laptop and a gawky Linux install - but they would work together.
I'm sure things have improved. I'm currently running Ubuntu (see previous blog postings here) on a three-year old Sony Vaio (VGN-S170B) - it's a compact and light machine and fast enough for most things - the best feature is the 1280x800 display which is pretty sweet (you'd expect Sony to have decent displays) - coupled with Ubuntu's aesthetics it's turned a couple of heads and a few people have asked me what "it is" at conferences, etc. By far, Ubuntu (6.x) is the best laptop install experience I've had with Linux - pretty much everything worked out of the box (aside from getting it to play DVDs).
So is Ubuntu an OS/X killer - nah, not anytime soon - but keep watching - the gap is closing. Give it another couple of generations and I think Linux will compete favourably on the desktop - maybe then we'll see some real adoption and the availability of more apps. Maybe a Vista killer then.
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Aug
29
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My recent enthusiasm for Laptop Linux has been somewhat stiffled. I fired up my laptop to extract some files only to be told that Ubuntu couldn't find the display so would continue in headless mode. It offered to show me the log files which I accepted but which obviously told me (a mere mortal) nothing. That's a real shame because the single endearing quality of Sony Vaio laptops is the awesome display. I quickly Googled for the problem but found nothing - so for now the laptop gets added to the pile of things that need to be debugged. At one time (3 or 4 years ago) I used to enjoy mucking about with Linux but today I just need a working laptop.
Update Thanks to the tip from ThinGuy Ubuntu is back up and running in glorious 1280x800. If you are stranded in the same situation - follow these simple steps and you'll be fixed in just few minutes.
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Aug
21
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After a bit of Googling I found a solution to my slow firefox problem with Ubuntu; though I still don't know exactly what the cause is. The general consensus seems to be that Firefox doesn't handle IPV6 well - in my case it seemed that the name lookup was timing out after about 20 seconds (ie. looking in IPV6 space?). There are a couple of solutions :
1. disable IPV6 in Firefox. Type about:config in the address bar, filter on "IPv6" and set disableIPv6 to true. Restart Firefox.
2. create a file called "bad_list"* in "/etc/modprobe.d/" with the single line "alias net-pf-10 off". Reboot.
The second option will obviously effect all applications - ie. the IPV6 problem is likely to exist in Thunderbird as well.
Anyone know why I have to do this ?
[* the default Ubuntu install doesn't have a root password so you'll need to do "sudo passwd" - unless your happy doing everything with sudo]
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Aug
20
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I've been meaning to give Ubuntu another spin for a while now. I tried 5.10 about a year ago and was reasonaobly impressed. Just to recap - I only occasionally use a laptop (I prefer to travel light) and all I need is Thunderbird, Firefox, AIM, Star Office or Open Office, reliable APM, Wireless, Java, USB storage and maybe play the occasional Movie (DVD or Tivo). Also, just a reminder - I have a Sony Viao laptop which has proved to be a difficult host for Linux - I've tried numerous distros and haven't been able to get basic features working reliably. Ubuntu 5.10 was better than most but still not good enough to replace the encumbent OS.
So, on to the Dapper Drake (the code name for Ubuntu 6.06). I used the Desktop CD so I didn't have to commit hard drive space until I'd at least taken Ubuntu for a spin. Video, Mouse, sound and even wireless we're all detected automatically, a USB drive was detected and mounted and I was able to configure a networked printer. But the acid-test was whether machine would hibernate when I closed the lid - so I configured the power settings and tried it ... and to my delight (and surprise) it worked without a problem - I tried a couple of times and it seems pretty reliable.
The Desktop CD concept and Ubuntu's execution is pretty impressive - I
didn't notice with 5.10 but there's an install option that will take
your from the Desktop CD to a full install; it has a pretty impressive
disk partitioner and allows you to mount existing OS partitions (in my
case JDS and Windows XP) - I remember just a few years ago r/w access
to Windows partitions was a luxury. Post install - I needed a few
extras - Thunderbird and zsh - Ubuntu uses the Synaptic Package manager
which is pretty slick - and worked as expected. Next I need jdk1.5, GlassFish and NetBeans and I'll be done.
Overall I think Ubuntu has really improved in the last year - as well as the things I mentioned above - the default desktop theme seems pretty slick (if a little Autumnal) - certainly approaching the experience you'd expect with Windows or OS X - maybe not quite there butcertainly closing the gap. I was pretty impressed - Laptop Linux has come a long way since Yggdrasil (remember that?) so I think I'll be continuing my laptop linux journey with Ubuntu.
There are a couple of things I need to play with :
- Firefox seems slow;
- CPU Stepping seems broken - using the monitor I can see it steps down from 1.7MHz to 600Mhz yet the fan continues whinning like an F19 on afterburn - or maybe I just need a new fan. Actually I have a feeling the stepping and Firefox performance might be related - there's a lag between hitting peak CPU and stepping up the CPU frequency.
- I need to install a different media player - as the pre-installed Totem is DRM crippled (Sigh).
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Oct
3
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I've been a Linux laptop user for about four or five years but my recent laptop upgrade set me back a bit - to the point where I've been forced to use Windows XP as my primary work environment. Which, I should add, is pretty nice once you have removed the Outlook and IE cruft and added a decent mail reader and browser (and added some security). Anyway for about 9 months I've been trying to find time to take a look at some additional distro's to see if they support my Sony VAIO any better than JDS / Suse.
I was reading David Coldrick's blog entry about running NetBeans on Ubuntu - and that reminded me I really should give Ubuntu a try (after all it claims to be the Linux for Humans); so before I'd finished reading David's entry I'd kicked off a download of the Ubuntu 5.10 Live CD
I quickly burnt a DVD (I didn't know you could burn DVDs from CD images) and booted my laptop. My heart sank as the bootloader came up - the video was all messed up - indicating it had detected the wrong refresh rate or something (the Sony VAIO 1280*800 screen has given other distros problems too). Fortunately, I let the boot run its course - when the window manager started it correctly identified the screen and corrected the display.
Anyway, I wasn't in the mood for a debug session so instead decided to look around the base Live CD install - all in all it seems pretty neat (though the default brown Ubuntu theme is a little depressing) and it has pretty much everything I need - though I would have to upgrade to a more recent version of Firefox and Thunderbrid, get the Cisco VPN software running and tackle the depressing APM / ACPI issues that I always anticipate with Linux and laptops. All that said, Ubuntu could well be worth investing a little more time in. I didn't manage to see if the included Totem would play DVD's out-of-the-box because you can't remove the Live CD DVD (Obviously). I'm going to order the *free* CD's and give it a try when I get some spare cycles but not before I give the latest Mandrake a spin.
