my  block

where uzairs roam

Continuing a recent trend of doing things I should have done long ago (switching to Opera, swing dancing, paying attention to classes), I have switched from Windows to Linux. Yes, finally, the day has arrived, and it’s a bigger deal than you think, given that:

• I once actively (well, semi-actively) pimped Microsoft software as a Student Ambassador and as an MVP
• I still have an MSDN Universal subscription, which means I get all the software I need to keep me happy and an MS customer forever for free

So, why? Well, I’m increasingly working with open source software, and in non-.NET languages. And while Cygwin is a fabulous attempt at bridging the Windows and *nix worlds, and actually achieves a fair deal, it isn’t perfect, and in fact, quite a pain in many ways. (One of the most obviously irritating is its terminal, which absolutely blows. I got around that by running it through Putty with GNU Screen, which made it pretty damn tolerable.) The other reason was a lot iffy-er, and was in spite of the fact that I’ve been using Windows forever and I’m quite happy with both its performance and its stability. I’ve never gotten a virus in my years, and those rumours of being hacked within a few minutes of connecting to the Internet are just that to me — rumours. Still, I’m a little sick of being afraid to trying software because I don’t want to mess up my precious Windows registry and have my system’s performance spiral into a non-responsive oblivion.

Last week, I decided to download the new version of Ubuntu (called ‘Edgy Eft’ – another area Linux has caught up with Microsoft: crap names) and give it a spin. I managed to time it just right and the university network, which normally draws the line at 10kb/s managed to pull the whole 700MB ISO down in under half an hour. The installation was fairly slow, but since the CD doubles as a Live CD, unlike a Windows installation I had plenty of games and other applications to amuse myself with (Minesweeper ahoy!). The installation was done in about an hour (includes CD burning and partitioning) so I started to look around. The first thing that I noticed was that it got all of my hardware figured out right away, and entirely unassisted — that’s pretty impressive given that after a fresh Windows installation, I can’t play audio or get on the network until I’ve run my Fujitsu drivers CD. Coolio. I also noticed that Gnome 2.16 is quite, quite pretty, an interesting blend of Windows and OS X philosophies with an identity of its own. The default Ubuntu theme is a bit dull, but overall, everything looked and felt very solid and performed very well.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to migrate all my years of email and contacts and calendar info over from Windows, so I started looking at the software I was most likely going to use. For email, the choices were Gnome’s own Evolution and Thunderbird; I was leaning towards the latter since it’s Firefox’s cousin and because it reportedly has better IMAP support, but eventually went with Evolution because it had a more integrated Outlook-y feel to it. Bad idea: its interface is crowded and generally a poor imitation of Outlook’s. Ultimately, I decided not to bother with it immediately and instead start some work. Whereupon I discovered other surprises:

• Gnome’s software installation/update tool, Synaptic, rocks! I used it to install Firebird and several other packages, and it did dependency handling etc. very nicely. Where necessary (eg, with the .deb-packaged installer for Opera), I could switch to the terminal and use apt-get just as easily.
• All the included options for playing media (videos and MP3s in my case) are crap. I had to install additional packages to get the codecs necessary for this although, since I knew what I was looking for, this was fairly simple through Synaptic.
• Gnome’s terminal software is rubbish. I’m a big GNU Screen user and have my .screenrc set up to bind the arrow keys for switching between screens. On Gnome’s terminal, that didn’t work. I messed around with the keybindings for a bit, but I couldn’t get it to pass those control sequences through to Screen.
• That advice about installing prelink and preload to improve performance is good stuff. Though to be honest, the desktops (and this goes for both KDE and Gnome, and possibly Linux desktops in general) are less crisp in terms of performance than Windows.

By this point, my inherent bias towards KDE was beginning to surface, so I irrationally made the decision to start using KDE instead of Gnome (irrational because I could’ve done something smaller to fix the situation). I tried simply installing the kubuntu-desktop package and switching sessions, but that didn’t work and I kept ending up back in Gnome. So I tried uninstalling Gnome in the vain hope of forcing Ubuntu’s hand. When that didn’t work, I made another irrational decision because I wanted a pristine Linux installation: I deleted my Linux partition and downloaded the Kubuntu ISO. For those who don’t know, Kubuntu is the version (fork?) of Ubuntu that ships with KDE as the default desktop environment. I wasn’t so lucky with the network this time, so I left it downloading and got some sleep.

After a few hours of sleeping and installing, my new KDE 3.5.5 desktop was ready to go. And immediately, I noticed a few things:

• KDE is much more elegant than Gnome, but much uglier. My definition of ‘ugly’ is ‘has no personality’, which KDE is guilty of by having a default theme laid out almost exactly like Windows.  Yeah, yeah, it’s a feature, not a bug.
• The KDE login manager (KDM) is horribly, horribly ugly. I mean it — it’s so bad, I’m actively considering switching to GDM. Actually, the full truth of the matter is I’m pretty sure I’m going to find a theme that makes KDE look like Gnome and install that. (Or maybe install Mezzo. Mmm…)
• KDE’s media applications are slightly better off out-of-the-box than Gnome. Amarok, for example, popped up a dialog box telling me it wanted to install codecs for playing MP3s. Kaffeine, the media player, is equally impressive, playing just about everything I’ve thrown at it (ASF, MPEG, AVI, MOV) without hesitation, and without some of the quirks WMP has, such as refusing to allow you to skip around in a movie.
• KDE’s terminal software is quite nice. It lets you create new Screen sessions from a menu! Jeez, that’s a pointless feature, but hey, it shows they were thinking. So now my only peeve is that, by default, things aren’t copied to the clipboard buffer when you highlight them — you have to do that and then right-click, Copy to make it happen. I haven’t thought of a convenient unused keybinding to assign to that yet…
• KDE has a ridiculous number of K* applications (Konqueror, KWrite, etc.) that all work amazingly well, approaching the quality of the top open source products (Firefox, OO, etc.). Honestly, given the amount of pain involved in writing any one of those applications that well, you wonder what they could accomplish if they stuck to the point and invested all their energy in the core KDE platform. They’d take over the world, it’s as simple as that.

Return of the Windows

I wasn’t satisfied with the whole e-mail situation, so I started looking at my options again. Now I’ve played with VMWare and VirtualPC etc. a fair bit, and one of the things that’s often struck me is that it would be awesome if you could get those apps to use a physical hard drive to run virtual machines from instead of creating a file that represents a virtual hard drive. The use would be that you could boot up an existing Windows installation from inside a Linux installation, making a dual-boot (in the traditional sense of the word) unnecessary. And of course you’d get the standard VMWare benefits, such as ‘pausing’ Windows if/when you don’t need it. In addition, you could always boot up directly into the Windows installation, so you’d always have that as a fallback.

Well, just like every other idea (and domain name, dammit!) on the net, someone’s thought of it. The VMWare folks, actually, and they’ve even gone and made the product that lets you do this free of charge! Crikey, what is this world coming to? That’s entirely too much functionality to give away to who-knows-who. These are the times you want to send RMS, ESR, Linus etc. fruit baskets. (OK, maybe not Linus…)

Anyway, a few quick Google queries and a few painfully slow downloads later, I’m all set up, with my existing Windows installation booting up inside new Ubuntu! It works just about flawlessly (some software demanded to be re-activated, which apparently you can do without problems with a simple reboot into the Windows install), and is fairly performant. So now I can continue to manage my email, calendar and contacts within Outlook till I make a decision. And I can also not worry about updating my PDA, or restarting my Bittorrent downloads!  can even post my blog entries from Live Writer ;)

I. Am. Psyched. Now, on to the real work.

(And final observation: Linux-on-the-desktop as a widespread movement reminiscent of the current Firefox-fever is not as far off as you think. Be vewwy vewwy quiet and you might hear it rolling along.)