So twice a year I get excited about the latest Ubuntu release and it’s that time of year again. For the past three release cycles I have treated the Release Candidate as “good to go”.

Every release of Ubuntu impresses me in one way or another, but 9.04 is for me a landmark. While the changes are subtle, this is by far the biggest leap in terms of polished and presentable.

Unlike Microsoft and Apple major releases, and this is going to mess with your brain, when a new version of Ubuntu comes out you don’t have to go and buy new hardware to keep up. Quite the opposite. The old machine in your cupboard is MORE likely to be useful again with a new version of the operating system. Wild.

8:10 in October didn’t pack a massive punch for me. Sure, it was easy to install, worked really well out of the box with little grief, but so did 8.04 in April 2008 so no big wow factor there.

What makes 9.04 so different is how it feels like it’s all grown up. Here are the highlights:

Smooth Fonts

Ubuntu has never looked so good. Font smoothing is a very subtle thing. You don’t really see it unless it’s great. That’s why a web page looks better on a Mac - but now Ubuntu is right up there.

Boot time

This is being bounced around alot - and it’s pretty darn brisk. To give an idea of performance, from grub (linux starting to come to life after the machine has found itself) to login for me is 11 seconds! That translates to about 25 or so seconds to go from power on to completely ready to work when auto-login is enabled. That’s so so fast.

Performance: EXT4 File system and video rendering

There is a feeling of overall briskness that comes with Jaunty. It’s just quick. It feels quick. Two major components of that are support for EXT4 file systems and better video rendering. I don’t have metrics, but this baby just feels BRISK.

No offense, but I’m tired of Navicat and Emerald not playing well together. I used to be a big fan, I have a paid license, and I think the feature set is unequal, but if a tool I need every day doesn’t work every day, then I have to move on.

Why use a GUI Mysql tool?

In every other way I’m a command line junky. The idea of finding / creating / updating things in a mysql table using the mysql command line does not appeal to me AT ALL though. No way, in this scenario visibility is king.

GUI Mysql Tools like mysqlcc and navicat vs myphpadmin

Myphpadmin is a very popular tool for managing mysql settings and data. The difference between it and tools like mysqlcc and navicat are that mysqladmin is a php application that sits on the server.

The advantage of this is that by default, your mysql database will allow connections from “localhost” so you can throw mysqladmin up there and login. Locally installed tools however need an extra step, that you may or may not want to take, and that is that you have to tell mysql to ALLOW access to certain IP addresses. If you always work from the same place, and your IP address is fairly static, then that’s not a big deal. If you roam the earth though, you may have to open up ANY IP address and that’s a bad idea.

Allowing those IPs can be done through the nomal control panels like plesk or cpanel or using the mysql command line ( as root ).. Google it.

Why mysqlcc?

After giving up on Navicat, I looked around alot and eventually found mysqlcc. It’s OOOOLD but it’s great. In many ways not as good as Navicat, but in some even better - like the way a view has a mysql header at the top that you can modify to filter down results.. nice.

It’s very easy to install in Ubuntu ( tested under 32 and 64 bits from 7.04 to 8.04 ) even though it’s an old project, and not in the repositories.

The steps are basically:

1) Get the rpm install file 2) Convert it to a deb using alien 3) Install

The RPM

Download the appropriate RPM from here here. Select the 386 or amd64 version depending on your install.

Convert it to a .deb file

In a terminal,

sudo apt-get install alien

cd [directory where the rpm file is]

alien mysql*.rpm

sudo dpkg -i mysqlcc*.deb

You’re done. To launch type “mysqlcc” in a terminal or create an icon. If you think it looks old and clunky, well you’re right - but just go to Options > Themes and select “Plastik” and you have a very modern looking look and feel that will match your install very well.

If you get an error try,

sudo apt-get install libqt3-mt

I’m not yer “Have laptop, am good to go” kind of guy so I have multiple systems, of which one is a laptop for travel.

How did I afford that attitude when I was a windows user, or how much would switching to a Mac cost me? Lots! As a business owner I never used pirated software and had a license for every instance of every install I had. Because of that I was an early adoptor of things like Open Office, even on the PC, because I wasn’t going to shell out for more than one instance of Office.

I have 5 systems.

• Primary home office Dual monitor Ubuntu Desktop
• Primary outside office Dual monitor Ubuntu Desktop
• Ubuntu box in the home theatre room
• Ubuntu Laptop
• Old G4 to sync my iPhone to

Total software costs in the last 2 years? I bought a sync tool for my Mac to do two way sync between the iPhone and Google Calendar - and if I wanted my USB webcam to work with iChat I’d have to spend some more - but that’s another story.

Focusing on the systems that I use day in, day out - nothing is what I pay, with no compromises. Kick ass, hardcore business systems with interface features I couldn’t get anywhere else. Wow.

How do you like them apples?

gedit is Textmate for Linux

I’m a recent convert to gedit for my rails development after reading a digg article about how to make gedit act like Textmate. Well I’ve never used textmate, but after just a short spell of using some textmate like features, I’m sold too.

Gemini

One of the two plugins that I’ve grown to love is Gemini by Gary Haran for the auto-insertion of closing tags.

I like it, but it also drove me nuts in it’s default form, in that it auto completes the single apostrophy - fine in code, but if you are jumping back and forth between code and text creation then this is really annoying. Words like “doesn’t”, “hasn’t”, “don’t” etc. all kick off the closing quote - not ideal.

Removing and adding rules to Gemini

The beauty of Open Source is you can change it. If I knew Python, what I should really be doing is contributing with a “configuration” screen for Gemini, but I don’t - so I’ll just hack it.

To remove the single quote rule, open the file:

/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/gemini.py

and search for

“class Gemini:”

  start_keyvals = [34,  39,   96,   40,   91,   123,  60]
  end_keyvals   = [34,  39,   96,   41,   93,   125,  62]
  twin_start    = ['"', "'",  '`',  '(',  '[',  '{',  '<']
  twin_end      = ['"', "'",  '`',  ')',  ']',  '}',  '>']

and change to:

  start_keyvals = [34,   96,   40,   91,   123,  60]
  end_keyvals   = [34,   96,   41,   93,   125,  62]
  twin_start    = ['"',  '`',  '(',  '[',  '{',  '<']
  twin_end      = ['"',  '`',  ')',  ']',  '}',  '>']

Restart gedit and you are good to go!

Adding rules, eg. % for Rails

Adding is pretty much the same process. In Rails views, you often use:

<% content %>

so it would be great if Gemini had a rule for % and that’s really simple. Looking again at this block of 4 lines of code, what we have is 2 lines that state ASCII values, and 2 lines that show the character.

By modifying and adding % and it’s ascii value 37, we end up with:

  start_keyvals = [34,   96,   40,   91,   123,  60, 37]
  end_keyvals   = [34,   96,   41,   93,   125,  62, 37]
  twin_start    = ['"',  '`',  '(',  '[',  '{',  '<', '%']
  twin_end      = ['"',  '`',  ')',  ']',  '}',  '>', '%']

Restart gedit, and typing “<%” in a view now kicks off the <> and %% rules - awesome.