undertakingyou

I have written quite recently how I have been using Mac OS X as my primary OS over the last month or so. In the times past I have failed at this in large part because I have not given Mac OS a chance. I found myself making quick judgements about the nuances that existed and then hated everything. This go around I am affording more of a chance here. Although I have been uncomfortable to a certain degree because I am used to all the FOSS tools that I have come to love and rely on. But there are a few things that have really been able to help me keep it together as I make this transition.

My Tomboy Notes replacement. I love Tomboy notes, and having something close to take a quick note. Mac OS stickies doesn’t even come close to it. After some searching I found Evernote, which really is awesome. I like it enough that I upgraded to the premium account. I think Evernote will replace my default note taking app permanently.

For chatting I have had to replace Irssi with bitlbee. I chose to use two things here, even though I could use one. The first is Adium, which is a great multi-protocol chat client akin to Pidgin. It even has a bird as its icon, a duck, that can be the color of your choosing. I use that for google talk, and a jabber account I have for school. The second chatting replacement is Macirrsi. I used port to install Irssi, but the terminal in Mac is still … not the best. Macirssi gives the power of Irssi but without the headaches of mac terminal.

For a text editor I like to use vim. Vim is available in Mac OS, but I have found in Linux that sometimes that it is very nice to have the extra features of a GTK application with the menu’s and what not. In comes MacVim  which provides basically the same functions as gvim. I still have vim in the terminal, which we all know is awesome.

OpenVPN is a great open source VPN solution that we use at work. With ubuntu I just go to the terminal and as root run openvpn with my .conf file or I would set up a VPN connection with NetworkManager and just connect. In Mac OS there is a very eligant solution with the use of Tunnelblick. Seems to be more fickle with configuration file options, and there are some more steps in setting up a connection. Otherwise there is a simple connect on demand option that keeps things going smoothly.

On ubuntu I really liked using gnome do for quick startup of applications. Gnome do is based on the native Mac OS Quicksilver, which is actually quite awesome. Gnome Do has done a great job in replicating it. Because Mac OS didn’t have any kind of menu until recently, Quicksilver is a must so you can access things easily.

There are some apps that I have not found yet a suitable replacement.

• Revelation, password keeper. I have keepassx but it isn’t as good.
• Banshee, a great music player. The current Mac OS version won’t run for me, and iTunes just can’t hold a candle to it.
• A decent terminal. The default terminal is still the best that I have used out of iTerm and Terminator. But there are some drawbacks still with the default terminal.

I have been a fan of ubuntu linux since the first time I installed it 4 and a half years ago. I have tried many others over the years and always come back to ubuntu linux. But with the latest release some things have me worried.

For starters, this is the second LTS that has huge oversights or where not enough time was taken. LTS suggests a machine that is out of the box stable, and that will remain so for at least the two year cycle to the next LTS if not until the 3 years of support is up. With the 8.04 Hardy Heron release there was beta software included, the reason behind this that it would allow greater function in the future. But that isn’t what an LTS is about, it is about a stable machine out of the box, not when the box gets updated software in one to two months.

With this latest LTS there is once again things that made me think that the designation Long Term Support is something that just comes along every two years and has nothing to do with the actual stability of the system at hand. I had a friend that went to upgrade and now can not get his system up and running. The graphics drivers have completely gone baserk. He has ATI graphics in his laptop and according to this bug report ATI graphics just don’t work with Lucid right now. The explanation being that ATI is closed Blah Blah Blah, and ATI hasn’t put out a kernel module compatible with the kernel we used blah blah blah.

Bullshit. Complete and utter rubbish. What about the open source radeon driver? Why wasn’t that developed so that people could actually view what the system has to display? Or better yet, get off the pride wagon and delay the release until it is something that could truly be called LTS. What? You couldn’t do that, it would be absurd? Dapper Drake was released two months late so that it could be polished. That delay was something that impressed me about ubuntu in the first place.

I am beginning to think that I should part ways with ubuntu. It will be a bitter day when I pull the trigger and move on to another distro. Until then I sit here using the last edition of ubuntu which I finally got tuned in to the point that I need. I would consider updating sooner but I need to work on projects using the computer, not work on the computer.

Of all the distros that I have tried I like the debian base over the ‘traditional’ rpm based distros. I am seriously considering trying out Debian Sid. Or at the least Debian Lenny. Any suggestions of other debian based distros to try I am open to and I would appreciate you passing them on.

I upgraded to ubuntu 9.10, or as I like to call it kosmic kangaroo. I think this was pottentially my most problematic upgrade.

First, let me clarify, I did fresh installs. So it really isn’t an upgrade, but still. I tried it on the desktop first. If my wife can’t check her email during the day . . . oh well, right? She wouldn’t say that. But oh well. The desktop install was really smooth. Had a small issue with sound but I got that worked out.

The laptop on the other hand was . . . a problem. The MacBook Pro was quite a pain in the butt. The real issue is grub2. It took two install tries to get the machine to boot. It boots now, so that is good. But it took a bit. Other things: the wireless doesn’t resume after suspend. I have to remove and modprobe the module and restart wicd.

For my friends machine we tried to have two hard drives in there and the machine would not, would not install grub. We couldn’t get the thing to boot at all. We tried RAID, LVM, LVM with /boot outside the LVM, no LVM at all. Grub just kept saying it couldn’t figure out the filesystem type, and wouldn’t install.

After the install I think the only ‘new’ thing that I really like is the further integration of pulseaudio. It is much easier to set up the pulse audio stuff. Otherwise, just the standard re-installation changes.

One thing that fedora really has over ubuntu, by leaps and bounds, is artwork. Each release has a contest and all the entries are great. The artwork is awesome. I use fedora backgrounds in ubuntu because it is so much better.

So that makes me wonder, is that because ubuntu doesn’t have a contest or because fedora folks are just better at art?

So, I ran into an interesting issue two days ago, and it makes me wonder if the ubuntu installer is in fact broken.

Many of you know that a moved back to ubuntu after a two month stint with fedora. I kept my same home folder to keep preferences and such. So, I was a little surprised when I went to go and change some user preferences with the gui tool and my user wasn’t there, didn’t exist. What happened? Well it seems that as the ubuntu installer made my user it didn’t change permissions on my home folder to my new user of will with a uid of 1000, but kept my old user of will with a uid of 500. This caused some kind of hang up and the only thing that I could think to do was to backup and reinstall.

So, what I would expect is what both fedora and Opensuse do. They ask you, “hey, there is already a home folder by that name, should we change the permissions so it is yours?”

So, I think that Ubuntu 8.10 is a great step in the right direction. Now, that said, some of that isn’t ubuntu’s doing at all. The linux kernel is better than ever I think. More stuff seems to just work. For instance, I am very pleased with the mad wifi guys for getting the ath5k and ath9k drivers in the kernel. That gives me wifi right out of the box for both my desktop and MacBook Pro. Also, at work I was able to hook to just about any printer that I wanted. What is cool I didn’t have to install anything extra at all, it just worked. So thanks to the cups folks for doing a great job in getting in lots of PPD’s for us.

Now, one thing specifically about ubuntu. I think that the work of the ubuntu folks and mactel is definitely in the right direction. They have taken the MacBook Pro FN keys and made it so that the power manager handles the LCD backlit rather than needing an additional application. Also, ubuntu has regained its feel of being a rock solid yet smooth OS, something that was lost with Hardy.

Now, that isn’t to say that there isn’t problems. I still can’t get 3D stuff going with my geforce 5200 FX graphics card on the desktop. But, otherwise I really am very pleased.

I got tired of ubuntu. Now, this may not surprise some, but for me, this really is pretty big. I am tired of some of the fight I have had to have a working system. So, the other day after my wife complained again about update issues, I installed Fedora 9 on the home machine. And it really isn’t that bad. It is easier to get MP3 support and DVD playback than ubuntu. Although some things are harder. Syncing my palm for instance. I had to hunt down the two packages that I needed in order to sync my calendar w/ evolution. A little frustrating. And after one of the updates it rewrote my xorg.conf without a mouse. Took me a while to figure out that one. But, in general, it really does feel solid. I like sudo, so I will have to enable that. And Clint still needs to package the latest gnome-do for me because I like DO.

So for now, ubuntu goodbye. I will try out intrepid when it is released.