ubuntu

The human(e) operating system

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 | Personal | No Comments

A lot has happened in the OS world over the past year or so. Microsoft has released their newest and greatest OS, Vista, which is riddled with ‘difficulties’ and ‘issues’. Like throttling your network performance to 10% of the full capacity when you are listening to media files, due to DRM checking. In fact, DRM is a cornerstone of Vista’s construction and coupled with Microsoft’s ever-increasing arrogance and refusal to play nice with others (yes, I have been rather slow to fully realise the scope), I decided that it was about time to try something else when my computer died last December (blown PSU and motherboard and damages to the CPU, in case anyone was wondering).

Now, I have written about trying Ubuntu before, here, but as a blemish on my own name, it was somewhat scathing remarks that flowed from my keyboard about it. The truth of everything is that I probably expected it to work like Windows and with the same mannerisms, but, naturally, GNU/Linux does not work like Windows. So, bearing with me a decent portion of experience in running GNU/Linux now and then since the fairly early days, a high amount of being fed up with Microsoft, a dislike of Apple’s tricks for vendor lock-in, and a general idea that it was time to start acting according to my own ideals, I once again went looking at the GNU/Linux landscape.

One of the principal things to remember about GNU/Linux is that it is founded on openness, collaboration, and… choice. This means that there is a lot of different distributions: Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Slackware, and many, many others. Each of these distributions serve a particular segment of users and have each their way of organising things (mostly), so where do you start? One option is to go on and investigate them all at Distrowatch or for a slightly more limited amount of distributions you can check out Zegenie Studio’s Linux Chooser. Since I have run GNU/Linux several times before I already knew what distribution I would like to use: Ubuntu.

So with a lot of new shiny computer parts assembled, I booted the Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) LiveCD, clicked install, waited some time and then I had a fully functioning system, except for the integrated network chipset, which was unknown to Linux. The vendor had thoughtfully supplied a network driver that only worked on an older kernel version and generally wasn’t behaving very well after I tried to convert it to a newer kernel version (once a developer, always a developer, eh?). Fortunately, I had an old PCI network card lying around that I installed in the computer and then everything ran wonderfully.

The system isn’t too uncommon for a Windows user, but it has its small quirks here and there. One of the things I have been doing a lot has been .NET development, in particular in C#, so after having played around a bit with configuring themes, setting up power management and things like that I have the first panic attack, ‘there is no Visual Studio here, what do I do?!’ Carefully repeating the breathing exercises I had prepared in advance I quickly relaxed. There’s bound to be something around for working with .NET programs given Mono‘s track record of keeping up with the .NET framework. Quite right so, there is MonoDevelop, which is based off of the freeware Windows editor, SharpDevelop. At the time I used it, there was still no debugger support and the auto-completion sort of worked, I hear it has gotten better since, but unfortunately C# started to annoy me around the time of the switch anyway (I shall try to remember to write more about my issues with it in another blog post), so I haven’t really done much personal development for .NET since then.

All in all, I have been glad that I chose to exert the effort of getting used to GNU/Linux and the way of doing things in this world as it frees me from the vendor lock-in that Microsoft and Apple dish out to their customers and once you get used to how things work in this different world, they actually just work. As an added bonus, several of the distributions come with a centrally managed repository of software that can be checked against for updates for all your applications at once. As an added added bonus, they never install updates without telling you, unlike some other companies.

Colour me convinced for a brighter future with GNU/Linux and open standards.

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Humanity to others

Sunday, February 20th, 2005 | Personal | No Comments

I was taking a look at the progress of the Mono WinForms roadmap and I thought I might consider contributing a few controls of the missing, but since mono is primarily developed on linux and that Cairo (the vector graphics library) seems to be primarily developed on linux as well, I’d better pick up a linux distribution. Now, I’ve run Linux (excuse me GNU/Linux) before and to quote the Hot Shots movies: I am no stranger to pain. Now, the great question in linux-land is: which distribution? So picking pseudo-randomly by asking in my irc channel, I came up with the answer: ubuntu, as no one had tried it yet in there.

Here I am, running ubuntu (which means ‘humanity to others’) and while it was pleasing to set up compared to RedHat 2.0 (yes it’s a while ago), there are some shortcomings and I have had some soundcard woes as I have multiple soundcards, but those are tales for another time. Overall I am pleased at the progress, but there is still some way to go to get to the usability levels I am used to from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but granted, I have a lot of choice and it is rather interesting to hack away on the themes.

Now, if ONLY there was an IDE in lieu with Visual Studio I might even consider adopting this thing for more frequent use. But what is the customary thing to do in linux-land, yes, write it yourself! Let’s see, I might get enamoured by GTK# and feel like taking a stab at progressing MonoDevelop. Only the future can tell.

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