Linux Loses My Desktop
Okay, I give up.
As i’ve written before, I’ve run Linux (SUSE) on my personal desktop and home servers for several years prior to moving to the Mac. I still run Linux for my home server. The only Windows computer I have running at home is my kid’s computer. They have games that won’t run elsewhere.
I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my office desktop in a dual boot configuration. It handled my dual monitors, quad core CPU, 4Gb of RAM without a hitch. But what it couldn’t handle was working in my office. Now, I had no problem administering our dozen or so Linux servers, reading/writing Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents. I had no problems dealing with our various Java applications, or accessing data on our office network. But, two things have made a permanent conversion difficult, at best. Number one is Exchange/Outlook. I wrote about this earlier. Interacting with Exchange via Linux is painful if you use Exchange calendaring, contacts, or anything other than mail. There is no good way to interact with Exchange calendaring in Linux. Number two is somewhat surprising. As part of a server upgrade project we have adopted Citrix XenServer to handle server virtualization. This is based on the Linux-based Xen project. You would expect it to be very cross platform. You would be wrong. The management tools are Windows only. So, it uses a Windows only management console to manage Linux based hypervisors with Linux guest virtual machines.
Interestingly, both of these observations have been commented on in the last few days:
Where are the Enterprise Management Tools for Linux on the Desktop? by David Lane
What would you exchange Exchange for? by Doc Searls
So, I’m not alone.
I think as desktop virtualization matures, it will be easier to run the desktop of your choice. I use VMWare Fusion on my Mac to run Linux, Windows, and even Haiku. The downside for Linux is there will be less of an incentive to develop the replacements for Outlook and the enterprise management tools. There will also be fewer requests for those applications from corporate users. Why wait for the open source equivalent when I can run the Windows version in a virtual machine.
In the meantime, it’s back to XP. I’ve got work to do.
No More Sad Mac!
Two and a half years ago I popped into the Apple store in Des Moines and walked out with a 1.5ghz G4 Mac Mini. It wasn’t a rash purchase. I had planned on buying that particular model. It took over desktop duties from my SUSE 9.x Linux box I had built a couple of years prior. I needed something that could run the photography software I wanted to run, and I wasn’t willing to go back to Windows. It has served me well for two years. It has been run hard and put away wet frequently. A memory upgrade to the max 1Gb in the first year gave it some breathing room, and two external Firewire drives provided backup and archive space. I had been weighing the idea of replacing the mini with a new Intel Mac for many months. I was torn between a MacBook Pro and a low-end Mac Pro. Finally, in December ’07 I purchased a 15.4″ 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro. Portability won out over raw power. The day after I brought the MBR home, my mini died. Unwilling or unable to boot up. I took it to the local Kansas City Apple store and they confirmed my worst-case scenario: dead logic board, $450. I couldn’t justify spending that much money to fix a $600 computer. So, I took it home, still dead, and starting looking for alternatives. I found a company, DT&T Computer Service, that advertised $225 logic board repairs. I boxed up the mini and off it went. Weeks passed. And finally, 5 weeks and $240 (with shipping) later, my mini is back and running! In over 26 years of owning a large variety of computers, this was the first time I have ever paid to have one of them repaired. That alone was a strange feeling. But, stranger still was how much I missed having my mini on my desk. I had backups of everything on it, so there was no danger of data loss. I had a new Mac that was faster, portable, and sleeker looking. I guess I just wasn’t quite ready to give up on the mini. Now it’s home, getting a Leopard upgrade, preparing to become my wife’s ‘new’ computer, replacing her worn out HP laptop. Hopefully, it will live a long life and serve as force for good against Windows.l
I wish I had an iPhone.
I wish I had an iPhone. I’m definitely not the first to say that, or think it. In fact, I was wishing for an iPhone long before they were announced. Or, I was wishing for a mobile phone that was different from what I had, and different from what was available. It turned out the iPhone fulfills most of what I was looking for.
About a year and a half ago I traded my Palm Tungsten C PDA, and Motorola V600 phone for a T-Mobile Dash smartphone. I had been a long time Palm user, and T-Mobile customer. The Dash was the closest thing I found to replace my two devices with one. Since that switch I’ve had a lot of time to reconsider my choice, and how well it has worked for me. Let me dispense with the suspense: Windows Mobile 6.0 for Smartphones sucks. The Dash hardware has been a resounding “meh”.
The Windows Mobile experience starts with the interminable wait for the phone to boot up. There is no good reason for a phone to take this long from power up to the time it is able function as phone. Mine has the extra bonus of now repeatedly rebooting for a random period of time. I’ve let it reboot itself for over an hour to see if it ever was able to boot. Now, I just keep it on all the time. At night, I put it on the charger and turn off the ringer.
Unfortunately, the fail just keeps on coming after it boots. One of the reasons I choose the Dash was the WiFi capability. When it works, it works okay. Not great, not good, but okay. To turn it on means pressing the ‘Start’ button (modeled after everyone’s favorite Windows feature) and scrolling to find the comm manager application, turning on the WiFi radio. Then ‘Settings’ , ‘Wi-fi’, ‘Wi-fi Networks’, and either pick one that displays or press ‘new’, etc, etc. I don’t like doing that much work to use WiFi on a desktop or laptop, with a decent UI and pointing device. It really sucks to do it on a handheld device with a compromised UI and 4-way controller.
This points out the main flaw with Windows Mobile 6.0 for Smartphones. It is like it’s name, too much button pushing for the benefit. Everything takes too much UI interaction, too much typing on a compromised keyboard, too much scrolling on a compromised screen.
I’ve added a number of 3rd party applications (at considerable cost) to try and make the phone more usable. It has helped, but some of the apps, Pocket Explorer and Pocket Outlook come to mind are just beyond salvage. I’ve been waiting for one of the several Explorer replacements to arive, but none are stable enough to rely on. I’ve tried several replacement mail clients. While some were improvements in basic functioning, they all try to pile on too many other marginal features that get in the way of basic function.
I won’t go into the entire debacle of trying to sync my Dash with my Apple MacBook Pro.
So, why an iPhone? I’ve played with the iPhone several times. I’ve spent time performing the types of operations I (try to) use my Dash for. And, it works. It works well. Apple continues to show us what a good UI looks like, and how it works.
And why haven’t I bought one yet? I’m not ready to pony up the considerable sum for an iPhone, and until AT&T and Apple have a 3G iPhone to offer, I’ll wait.
Hand cart on the (Ruby on) Rails
In my previous post I detailed my problems getting NetBeans 6.0 to use the native Ruby installation on OS X Leopard. So, we pick up the story with that issue resolved.
Ok, time to create a new Rails project and get started. I go through the standard steps in NetBeans and am informed that there is a problem with my gems directory, and NetBeans thinks I am using Rails 1.2.6, instead of the 2.0.2 I installed. The error message sends me off the NetBeans wiki for details. So, off I go to figure out how to add GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to my environment, so NB will recognize my gems directory. After about 30 minutes of surfing for answers I find the right combination of pages that allow me to piece together the answer.
I’m now running with a freshly created Rails project, complete with a database, with tables.
NOW, I can start coding. So far, the NetBeans/OS X combination has been more frustrating than it should be. Hopefully, I’ve completed all of the initiation rites.
Accelerating From a Stop
Ok, step one: Install Netbeans 6.0 Ruby version. No problem here, it works like any other package install. Now to configure it to my taste. The main change is to change the default Ruby engine from the included JRuby to the OS X installed 1.8.6 version of Ruby. I have nothing against JRuby, but at this stage I don’t want to debug JRuby related issues, so I want to stick with the de facto version. On Windows the location of your local Ruby installation is easy enough to find, c:\ruby\bin\ruby.exe. On OS X I looked all over for it. It ran fine from the console, so it was installed and worked. But, where is the binary? I looked in the usual places, that I could think of, no joy. So, I turned to my local OS X/Ruby/NetBeans guru: Google. After much searching, I found a page with the path I needed. It seems that Ruby has been “framework-ized” into OS X. But, the binaries have been symlinked to: /usr/bin/ruby. Problem solved.
Step two: MySql. Downloaded. Installed from package. Done. Well, I need to install an OS X admin util. But, I can administrate it from the command-line in the meantime.
I opened the Depot Rails app from the Agile Rails book, ran the DB migrations and fired it up. Success.
Ok, I have a usable environment. Time to code.