February to Hardy?

Well, here we are in February and I’ve hardly touched Ubuntu in the past month. The Photoshop projects that just have to be done (still another couple of weeks out on that) have kept me busy.  In the midst of my projects, I’ve noticed that Vista is actually getting faster. “WTF, weren’t you just complaining about how slow Vista is?” you must be saying. Well here me out. I took the Vista SP1 RC a while back and I’ve noticed that booting from full hibernate is now very fast on Vista. Also wake from sleep is lightning quick…almost as quick as my wife’s Macbook! Not only that, but network file copies are moving along a bit better now. I’m waiting until the true final release candidate is out to upgrade the server, but as far as my laptop goes, SP1 is turning out to make Vista actually usable. Now if they can only get to SP2 in the next couple of months…

Also, I’ve gotten used to my Yahoo widgets on the desktop. I tried the gdesklets thing on Ubuntu, but they just didn’t look nice. “Who cares?” screams the peanut gallery. For those of you functionalism aficionados, don’t get me wrong, I’m in the trenches with you guys. But I’m slowly starting to see how having some nice eye candy makes my computing life better and more enjoyable, not to mention more functional. This is rather important since I’m on my various rigs at least 8 hours a day, if not more. So let’s look at the lay of the Vista land for me:

You’ll see that I have RocketDock and my various Yahoo widgets running. I check the stock ticker thing about 63 times per minute even though my portfolio is a buy and hold sort of outfit. Also the RocketDock is GREAT. It mimics how the most important part of the Mac UI (for OSX, OS9ers please go home to your straw huts and crazed ranting). I truly enjoy using it because I can customize all of the little icons with great ease. Sure I burnt about a day looking for and downloading every free icon set on the planet and then another day organizing them (I’ve yet to convert the mac-only icons, but we’ll get there someday), and a couple of minutes picking which ones represent my apps the best. Frivolous? Maybe. But all of that upfront investment in my time has led to allowing me to actually have a tiny ounce more of computing joy each and every time I use my m1330. Also both of these helpful little tools are great timesavers. About 98% of the time, I launch apps from RocketDock which is much faster than VistaBubble->All Programs->{sift….sift….sift….ah there it is} or even VistaBubble->{type some random word in the search bar…sift…ah there it is}.

This is not to say that I haven’t kept abreast of the Ubuntu forefront (especially in regards to the XPS m1330). Let’s see…oh biggest news EVAR–well at least for those of us that own a Dell XPS m1330′s with the Intel 965 graphics chipset and want to run Ubuntu.  Apparently Hardy Heron has a fix that allows compiz fusion effects to work on our computers!  If you recall, I tried to get this working and eventually found out that it was busted deep down in the guts of yee old driver and gave up. According to this bug report, it seems that the issue has been fixed or at least mitigated, but it does not seem to be performing well (nor does it seem to look very nice). The very last comment by Timo seems to suggest that the performance enhancements that are needed will not be going into Hardy Heron and thus they may actually remove compiz support. While I lament the thought, I guess it is the right choice since they’re in alpha trials already.

Also, I’ve jettisoned the Gimpshop enhancements for Gimp, but have not had a chance to learn the standard Gimp UI. Things are definitely different. I’ll have to track down some Photoshop->Gimp command map or video tutorials after I’m done with the urgent projects on my plate at the moment.

Anyway, the fact that compiz may actually be working on Hardy Heron means I may take an early upgrade and see how it works.  Maybe I will be able to get a dock thing working and may have to see if I can jimmy gdesklets to run Yahoo widgets.  Sounds like some good fun after my urgent Photoshoppery is complete.

Read Your Linux Partition from Windows with DiskInternals Linux Reader | Tombuntu

Tom, over at TomBuntu (hi Tom, I’m Tommy) has found a little widget called DiskInternals Linux Reader (note: no write access) that allows me to access files on my Ubuntu partition while I’m whiling my time away playing SimCity 4 on the Windows Vista side of my computing house.  Thanks Tom!  There are also suggestions for something called “f-s driver” which the commenters claim does the same thing.  I’ll have to say while it is nice to have access to my ubuntu files, I doubt that I’ll ever use it.  I have been using my Windows partition as my storage drive for music, videos, etc.  That way, I have access to these files on Ubuntu and Vista for free, I also only have one copy of everything in one place (cardinal rule of managing data of any kind!).  At any rate, I’ll try the tools out and keep them around for the just-in-case moment when I accidentally save something to my Ubuntu partition.

Read Your Linux Partition from Windows with DiskInternals Linux Reader | Tombuntu

Oh Vista, You So Slow!

After reading this article, I would have to agree that Vista is simply a dog.  It’s not even close to XP, let alone Ubuntu in the performance department.  I do give it points for eye candy, but I have enough trouble with it that I only keep the Vista side for gaming and do most of my daily tasks in Ubuntu (and XP since we use Visual Studio at work).

One of the major sticking points of Vista is the absolute doggedness in which it copies large files over my network.  Sometimes it plain just doesn’t work!  I’ll try to watch some Divx files and they’ll transfer over so slowly that it’s just unwatchable (that’s if they even transfer at all).  This is even a known bug and is supposedly addressed in SP1…we’ll see!  When I switch over to Ubuntu, it just works and smoothly at that.

I’ve also run into a several occasions where not only does the Vista-side not sleep or hibernate properly, but it will actually bork power management thus not allowing the m1330 to charge its battery until I reboot.  Oops!  So not only will my machine not hibernate, but it will not charge when plugged in!  Doh!

Anyway, I’m thinking of having moving my home server back over to XP since all I really need it to do is  download TV torrents to protect against Tivo snafus, SyncToy files around my network, run mozy backup, and host my top secret financial spreadsheets.  I’m sure XP SP3 would be a great candidate for this.  Of course I’m considering Ubuntu on this machine as it’s free and I’m getting pretty good at using it on a regular basis.  My main concern however is to ensure that my designated backup solutions just work.  In this case, mozy would need something that runs on Ubuntu (which they do not have yet).  The least trouble would to just let Vista live on that machine, take the patches as they roll in, and not rock the multiplicative onsite/offsite auto-backup rube-goldberg machine that I have cobbled together.  This will most likely be the case but I’ll probably end up cleaning things out on the server and XP will probably be my go-to OS.

I’m rather curious why Microsoft would invest so much time and effort to ship SP3 on XP when Vista is supposed to be the new flagship.  I mean, being a former MS employee, I know of the inner-workings and can see how this could happen, but honestly this sort of thing just confuses everyone.  Can anyone tell me the difference between MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Office Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger?  I’ll give you a hint…two of them are the same exact thing with different names, but the other two had distinct teams working on them even though 95% of the functionality overlaps.

Ok, ok, how about this one:  Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Live Photo Desktop.  Two separate apps that do just about the same thing except one is bundled in Windows and another comes as a download from Windows Live.  As you can see, confusion and duplicative efforts are Microsoft’s middle name even when it comes to their flagship Windows products.

Windows XP Speed Boost Coming with SP3 – Yahoo! News

Turkey Day Gaming

I’ve been over in Vista-land since getting a copy of SimCity Societies.  My take on the game:  it’s fun, but way too easy.  I think I’ll try to up the difficulty on my next city (probably cyberpunk or capitalistic).  I’ve also been playing with Yahoo Widgets more and more and loving them.  I’m going to try to see if there is a way to get these over on Ubuntu since there are a few that I really like the large, orange clock and at the neon gauges.

MissedBuntu

It’s been a while since I’ve been over on the Ubuntu side of the house.  Aside from the (I hate to use the word, but there is nothing else really suitable) drama at home, I had a midterm last week and decided to go Vista for it.   Why?  For the most part, it had to do with several episodes of wifi/firefox conniptions that Ubuntu had the last few times I used it. I’m not sure what happened each time, but the computer just had hardcore lockups each time. I mean, no mouse, no ctrl+alt+backspace, no nada. Since my midterm was a one time deal, meaning that if something bad happened during the test, I would not be given a second chance to open it and try again, I had to choose Vista since it’s been stable.  I was disappointed for choosing Vista, but I just couldn’t afford another lockup during something as important as a midterm. Anyway, I’ll have to go back and see if I can dig a little to find out what really happened during these particular bad episodes.

Giving up on compiz

I’ve tried to get compiz fusion running on the m1330 but since this guy shipped with the Intel 965 graphics chipset, it looks like there will be no compiz for me for a while.  I’m hoping there is a fix for the next Ubuntu release in spring 2008, but I’m not holding my breath.  The eye candy would have been nice, but I’ll get over it.  After all, I just want an OS that boots fast, shuts down fast, and is generally stable.  Vista really isn’t any of those things.  I’ve found that booting up is not really faster than XP, shutting down is still horrendously slow, and stability is not its strong suit.  I’ve had all sorts of trouble playing video over my home network in Vista that magically do not happen in Ubuntu.  Chalk one up for the penguin.

Vista network troubles

I’ve been running Miro on my Vista server for some time (Miro is a free, video podcast downloader that also does double duty as a tv torrent vacuum).  I use it to grab backups for all of my favorite shows in case my Tivo dumps them before I can watch them or if there is a conflict that the two Tivos can’t manage to work out.

While working at home today, I decided to sift the couple hundred gigs of free podcast videos and TV shows that Miro has been downloading.  Using the Vista side of the m1330, I found that the videos kept stuttering and would eventually stop transferring data altogether.  I thought the Airport Extreme that dishes out wifi was having a bad day so I rebooted it.  Unfortunately, that did not help.  I switched over to Ubuntu to see if I could play my videos and after installing a codec pack, totem whipped through them without any issues.

I’m not sure what’s happening on the Vista side of the house, but the boys and girls in Redmond best be shippin’ SP1 soon or I’m going to forced to delete that partition and give it all over to Ubuntu.

Remote Desktop – Ubuntu

The fact of the matter is that my server that does all of my backup and that sort of goodness runs on Vista. It also houses my budget spreadsheet so I need to get to it on a regular basis. I tried gnome-rdp but it keeps telling me that it’s unable to find my desktop. I’ve been looking around and think I need to try something called rdesktop (according to this anyway).

I suppose that’s the fun part about Linux. I mean RDP has been around for ages in the Microsoft world (they called it Terminal Server before) and it’s pretty much standardized there. You could use VNC or other protocols to get into another PC remotely, but it’s usually easier to just use Windows’ built in RDC app. After using Parallels on Hongyun’s Macbook and enjoyed the coherence mode that makes Windows apps look like they are native mac apps. I’m hoping I can find something similar to this for Ubuntu.

Up and Running

With the help of a buddy at work who is much more versed in the world of Linux than I am, I have gotten Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 to install on a separate partition and dual boot it with Vista Business.

My Dell XPS m1330 laptop shipped with Vista Biz edition on there and I wanted to keep it since there wasn’t much crapware preinstalled (thankfully). I uninstalled McAfffee Antivirus as that service has gone downhill as of late. I now use Antivir which nags every now and then, but at least is free and self-updates.

I went over to APC mag’s step by step walk through of this process and it went off without a hitch. Well, that’s not quite true. I was a dork and first tried to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and that didn’t seem to like the m1330 too much. I figured it’d be more stable, but that did not turn out to be the case. I couldn’t get X11 to start and ended up at the command line trying to fiddle with a configuration files for X11 (xorg.conf) to see if I could get it going. A fellow dual-booter at work told me that I’d have to move up to the Gutsy Gibbon tribe 5 version of Ubuntu and then it would work. Lo and behold he was right.

After the install, I was told to add a few lines to xorg.conf as found in this bug report. Adding those lines made the upper and lower menu bar hang out in their proper places instead of taking up what looked like 1024×768 territory.

As soon as I started up with the screen looking the way it should, I proceeded to run the update manager which seemed to find a bunch of things to update and proceeded to download and install them. I messed around with some of the settings to change font size since they were way too big and turned on more effects that I believe are powered by compiz. The effects while completely unnecessary add to my enjoyment of using Ubuntu immensely. I’m not sure what it is about having the nice effects and just the right setup, but it helps me enjoy my computing much more. For example, on Vista, I installed rocket dock, icon packager with their Local Flavor icon pack, along with a nice vintage looking desktop wallpaper from interfacelift. I also got rid of the Vista and Google Desktop sidebars in favor of Yahoo’s Konfabulator…er Widgets.

Anyway, Ubuntu has been a pretty nice system thus far and seems like it can be my primary OS except for the fact that I haven’t found drivers for my printer yet. This seems to be the achilles heel of Linux. Darned hardcopies!