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?

Where to start, er.. “Wow”. That’s where.

History

I bought this machine about a year ago and installed 32 bit Fiesty ( 7.04 ) on it, and man was it a pain in the butt! I didn’t help myself by choosing Xubuntu, which is I think part of the reason why I had so many power management issues.

Still, eventually I had a working system with Beryl and the eye candy I wanted, and didn’t even consider upgrading to Gutsy ( 7.10 ) based on the things I was reading in the forums.

I’m a bit older and wiser now, and I’ve had massive success with Hardy Heron beta on two dual monitor desktop setups, so as soon as 8.04RC came out, I couldn’t resist.

The install

First thing to note is that there was no need to change any boot preferences with 8.04. Previous versions needed some lapic / nolapic settings to be set to even get the live disk running, but no such troubles here. Threw in the disk and it worked.

I decided to trash my old install and reformatted the partitions. I do manual partitioning, giving 12gig to root, 4 to swap, and the rest to /home. This all went smoothly enough. No real suprises here. The only real change to install is that the timezone map is zoomable, and not to be a drag, but it’s pretty horrible!

Moving on. So, it installed no problem, rebooted no problem, but OF COURSE the wireless didn’t work.

Network connections and Broadcom Wireless

For a while I couldn’t get networking going AT ALL. I’d found issues with wired network with the beta, but thought it would have been fixed by the RC release.

Basically, if things look like they should work but don’t, open up a terminal and type:

sudo ifup eth0

that should wake up networking and have you good to go. Now for wireless… yikes.. this is never fun with Broadcom wireless cards. I fished around the forums and saw some strange things. Some people were seeing a restricted driver automatically coming up - I wasn’t. Others were finding easy solutions with the open source drivers ( that have “cutter” in the package name ). I tried a few things to no avail, got disheartened and went to bed.

After waking up, I searched some more and found this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=734003

and things started to make sense. I followed it, rebooted and.. uh nothing, so on to my secret weapon.. wicd.

wicd from http://wicd.sourceforge.net/ is a gem of a network manager and I’ve found it invaluable. This time last year I was pulling my hair out trying to get things working, and installed wicd and found that they WERE working - the built in network manager was just not getting the job done.

So, with wicd installed, I disconnected, grabbed a coffee and started sniffing around for other things.

Video Hardware

System > Administration > Hardware drivers informed me that I there was a restricted driver for my built in nvidia card. I enabled it, rebooted and had hardware acceleration. No sweat.

Screen Brightness

Leaving the confines of my dark basement office, and heading upstairs I notices that the screen was decidedly dull. Hmm. A bit of googling, and the solution I found was to right click on the top nav bar, select “Add to Panel” and add the “Power Manager Brightness Applet”.. Nice! A slider now controls screen brightness.

Suspend and Hibernate

OOooooh. It works! What else can I say. If you’re a mac user, you’ll wonder why this is exciting. If you’re a windows user you may have lost interest in whether things work or not, but in the world of Linux and Laptops, this is a biggy.

I’m having an issue with my network connection not coming back up, even though I have wicd configured to automatically connect to my network, but I can live with that compared to last years hit and miss disaster that was suspend and hibernate.

Flash

Now this is interesting.. that pretty much just works too. Unlike my experiences with the beta, I went to youtube, it told me I needed flash, I selected Adobe, followed my nose, and it installed and configured flash-nonfree for me without a hitch. That’s great!

Laptop buttons

Well they just work too. I have the basic play/pause, last/next, mute and volume buttons and they work. Awesome.

Creating a working environment

No real suprises here.. within 30 minutes I had the full compiz glory including cube, mysql & rails environment, thunderbird, avant window navigator and the rest. No issues here, and that’s very cool considering this is the AMD64 install.

Skype and the built in Ricoh camera

Boy was this a pain in the ass last year. Life is now slighly complicated by the need to get the 32 bit version of skype installed in my 64 bit environment. I used the tutorial here:

http://oligofren.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/skype-on-64-bit-ubuntu/

and it installed fine. OK, now time to fight with the camera.. uh.. wow. It just works. This time last year I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get the built in Ricoh camera drivers working, then I had strange usage issues that forced me to write a script to restart USB services every time I wanted to use it.. now it just works. I’m impressed.

Summary

Well, all I can say is that apart from the Broadcom driver, I’m blown away. I was expecting to fight this every step of the way and have been very pleasantly surprised. I’ve got about 3 hours time into this machine, of which 2 was the broadcom, and if you follow that link up there, you should have much less pain.

Kudos to the guys over at Ubuntu for hitting this one out of the park IMHO

Window’s doesn’t cut it

Ruby on Rails was the straw that broke the camels back for me, and motivated me to switch to Linux on my desktops and laptop. Since then, I’ve tried various tools, but here are a couple of things I wouldn’t like to try to do without.

Editor - Bluefish

Quanta is a close runner up but I find Bluefish to be “the one”.

Why? Well for me an absolutely ESSENTIAL need in a rails editor is a really good directory and file tree in the left nav. It’s great that rails has a place for everything, but let’s face it, rails applications also have lots of files. If I had to click Open and navigate to a file I’d shoot myself.

Bluefish sidebar does a great job of:

• 1) Finding your rails app
• 2) Making it the base directory of the tree
• 3) Allowing you to expand trees as needed

Personally, I find the visibility of files so good that as a general rule, if I can’t see all of the open file tabs without scrolling left or right, I close all files and start again.

Syntax highlighting is great, although you’ll have to add .erb as a ruby extension through the setup.

Feature wish: Multiple rows of open tabs would be nice, but then I’d just get into bad habits again.

MySQL tool - Navicat

I’m a command line kinda guy.. I’ll use a terminal to move files before I drag and drop, but for some reason I’ve never got hooked on command line sql. That’s possibly because in the early days, I found Navicat.

I know that phpmyadmin is somewhat of an industry standard, but personally I hate it! Navicat is a locally installed application, available for Windows, Mac and yes, Linux that for me blows the socks off anything else I’ve tried.

As it’s not running on the host, then there is of course the inconvenience of having to configurating mysql to allow your IP, but it’s worth it. I use both the Linux version, and the Windows version running under wine. Pretty much the same, except I have a Windows license, so that unlocks some extra goodies. I use navicat for:

• Adding sample data
• Fixing data ( not structures of course ) during development
• Administration on live sites ( e.g. flagging that someone has made a donation at Listingly.com )
• Browsing and generally perusing during development
• Backups! One click and you have a local backup of your remote application

Give it a go. 30 day free trial.

Quake style Terminal - Yakuake

Yakuake is a terminal that reveals and hides itself with the F12 key. For some reason, I just like using it for running my development server process in. It’s no different from a terminal window, but it just feels good to me to have it tucked away there.

SSHFS

Yikes, I’m going to reveal my bad habits now.. in that I don’t SVN and I don’t capistrano. I’m a bad person. It’s on the to do list now as I need to work along side my buddy benr75 on some projects, so no doubt I’ll take what he indoctrinates me with and apply it to my own stuff too.

Until then though, SSHFS is the ultimate. SSHFS is a way to mount remote folders as local folders across SSH. In other words, if you have SSH access to your server, you can mount it locally!

My personal setup is that I develop in:

/home/[user]/www/rails_app

and remote mount:

/home/[user]/rrr/rails_app

as the equivilent application on the remote server. I then have a couple of scripts:

getcore [railsapp] and sendcore [railsapp]

which either fetch or send:

/public /app /db

Of course after that I still have to manually run migrations, and restart mongrel processes but for a single developer environment I bet from a purely time efficiency perspective this effort is significantly less than the effort of using SVN.

As an aside, I always use SSHFS all the time when I realize that I have a file at home that I need at work and visa versa.. just open up an obscure port on your firewall and map it to 23 on your machine and you can mount the remote machine as a local folder.

Genius ;-)

XaraLX - In my mind the ultimate grahic design tool

Worthy of a mention as my rails projects would not be what they are without XaraLX. It’s really nothing to do with Rails, but for years and years this has been my tool of choice ( over Photoshop and Illustrator ) for design and implimentation. I cried for joy when I saw that they had an open source project!

xdesktop discussions are often heated and go long into the night. What’s best? KDE, Gnome, or XFCE? Well it depends, and wherever you look you’ll find people evangelizing one thing or the other.

What makes xdesktops different

Many things, but MANY of them are irrelevant. Linux is not like OS-X which gives you a choice of two look and feels ( which are both awesome btw ). Linux lets you change pretty much anything, so how an environment looks out of the box is totally irrelevant. If you see someone with a great XFCE setup that you like, you can just as easily create it with Gnome or KDE. That’s not the point.

Don’t Differentiate at all

Firstly, unless you are installing on an old laptop or something ( see later ) don’t feel you have to make this choice on day one. Personally, I install Ubuntu on a machine, then add xfce later ( google “installing Xubuntu on top of Ubuntu”. I DON’T install KDE, but do use some KDE applications ( e.g. Kopete for IM ) and the install of that seems to install the core of KDE at the same time.

What I’m trying to say is, you can’t get it “wrong”. You can install multiple xdesktops, and both:

• Choose which one to startup into when you signin without any performance implications
• Once in there, you can pick and choose which applications you like with little performance implications

The best thing is that going one way or the other only rarely has an impact on the steps you might read on a forum to install X or Y.. it’s all pretty much the same under the hood.

Differentiate by Applications

Each xdesktop comes out of the box with different applications, but this is irrelevant, as you can install any element of one in the other. You might love everything about KDE except the Konqueror browser

Differentiate by Weight

The only place this really makes a difference is if you are installing on older hardware. In the scenario the last thing you want to do is install everything then pick and choose. In fact, xfce is considered the de-facto standard for sluggish and old hardware so that is ONE definitive statement I feel I can make. While you’ll probably install your favorite browser on whatever xdesktop you choose, there is no denying that the core of XFCE, and foundational elements like the file browser are super fast. Nothing is thrown in there that is unnecessary, and to some, some things are left out ( like some networking services! ).

If you are like me, it doesn’t matter how gutsy your hardware is, you still like things as quick as possible, so no matter what xdesktop I’m using, I’ll use Thunar from XFCE for file managent. It’s a joy.

Differentiate by Bells & Whistles

Note - I don’t know enough about KDE to comment here. I also don’t know enough about how things run under the surface, I just know what I’ve found to work for me.

In my experience, XFCE vs Gnome is a choice between lightness and those little things that make working with an OS so much easier.

Two examples:

1) Drag and Drop from the Menu

In a nutshell, XFCE doesn’t do it and Gnome does. Where this becomes annoying is if you use Avant-Window-Manager to create an OSX like dock. Under pure XFCE you have to create a launcher on your desktop or somewhere else, then drag THAT to the dock ( and make sure there are no spaces in the fileame!). Under Gnome you can drag icons straight to the dock.

2)Multimedia Keyboard Support

To many this is minor, but with my Microsoft 4000 keyobard ( last remnant of MS! ) I don’t care about most of those extra buttons, but I want the Pause,Mute and volume buttons to work. I dicked with XFCE until I was blue in the face and even though the keyboard is a choice in the config, the don’t. Online tutorials suggest recompiling the kernel for this. er.. no thanks.

Others find that lack of Network support in the XFCE file browser is a deal killer for them. Personally, I find SMB such a clunky POS that I wouldn’t use it anyway, so that’s not a big deal. ( My permanent machines all have NFS mounts, and for temporary needs I use SSHFS ). You CAN get around these things ( google it ) but it’s not 100% elegant.

Pick ‘n Mix

The good news is you can pick ‘n mix the best of both worlds like I mentioned earlier. Here’s what I do, although not HOW TO do it - maybe later. The information is out there:

• Install Ubuntu
• Install xfce-desktop afterwards

I login to XFCE but do some overriding of core elements:

• xfce4-panel replaced by gnome-panel for drag and drop
• xfce-session-manager replaced by gnome-session-daemon for better keyboard support

The result is the ultra-light XFCE feel, but with some of the gnome features I can’t do without.