Over the weekend Kevin and I took one of my laptops to the local computer repair store for a diagnostic. As I suspected, the answer was that there was a problem on the motherboard and replacing it would cost almost as much as buying a new machine. So I’m looking to buy a new machine, and much to my surprise I’m considering a Linux box.
I do, of course, need Windows machines for work. Escaping from Microsoft simply isn’t an option. But equally a lot of my day-to-day use of computers is Internet work, and I can do that on any sort of PC. And Linux is finally starting to look like a viable alternative for a number of reasons:
- The Linux folks have finally got the message that it shouldn’t be necessary to have 10 years experience as a sysop before you can use their software effectively;
- The price of PC hardware is now so low that the absurd license fees Microsoft charges for Windows are now a real burden;
- Vista is turning out to be a disaster of colossal proportions and Microsoft is still planning to stop selling XP in a few months time;
- And on a personal level I’m interacting more and more with Unix/Linux software on the Internet and need to know more about it, in particular I want to be able to run Subversion locally
Probably what I will end up doing is buying a new XP-based laptop some time in June (assuming Microsoft doesn’t wise up and extend the deadline), but doing other stuff with Linux in the meantime. We have a retired desktop here that I’m planning to install Ubuntu on, and I’m thinking about getting an Asus Eee PC for web work when I’m on the road. But I haven’t made any firm decisions yet, so if you have any suggestions I’d be delighted to hear from you.
And no, I’m not considering buying a Mac. It would be useful for web site testing purposes, but being tied in to a monopoly operating system provider is bad enough, having a monopoly hardware supplier as well is just silly.
Aha! Credit to Zemanta here. It has just found this article which suggests that Microsoft will be keeping XP available for “budget laptops” such as the Eee PC beyond the current June 30 deadline. That’s good news in that they are starting to see sense, but really stupid tactically. I want XP on a development machine, not a cut-price notebook, and who is going to want to be $50 or so for a Windows license on a machine that only costs $400 and has a hard disc so small that you pretty much have to use it only for online work?
Microsoft’s big corporate clients are the ones fighting Vista the hardest. If you look at Dell’s website, it’s the “business class” Latitude series that they still offer with Windows XP.
I just put Ubuntu on my old laptop and on my old tower that we use to play video out to the TV.
It’s dirt-simple.
There’s a bit of not-simple in the final configuration, though. It took a bit of google-fu and geekery to get the Intel WiFi card to work with our non-SSID-broadcasting WPA2-secured home network.
Why do you need Windows for work?
Setting up dual-boot is pretty easy. You can have Windows and linux on the same machine.
Parallels Workstation allows you to run windows in a virtual machine under linux without having to reboot. I’ve got Parallels Desktop for my Mac at work and it’s great. It does require a lot of RAM, though.
OpenOffice is a pretty good drop-in replacement for MS Office, and produces MS Office-compatible documents.
WINE allows many windows programs to work inside of linux. Since you’re experimenting, it may be worth seeing if your windows apps are supported.
Why do you need Windows for work?
Because people pay me to develop Windows software. And if I’m doing development I really don’t want things like emulation clouding the issue.
Good news on Dell though. I only ever buy Latitudes. Kevin has Inspirons and they are very unreliable.
Because people pay me to develop Windows software. And if I’m doing development I really don’t want things like emulation clouding the issue.
Sounds like dual-boot may be in your future. Virtualization is still a good way to go, though.
A lot of my developers here are big on having VMs set up for different development and testing environments. It helps keep things separate and isolated. Need a Vista install to test in? Set up a VM. Need Windows Server 2003 to test in? Set up a VM. The big deal, though? They can easily revert a virtual machine back to a clean image if they hose it up too badly during development or testing.
Since I picked up my dinky little ASUS EEE and hacked it into advanced mode (not much of a hack but a good one to know) I’ve enjoyed the Debian distro it runs. Nice and simple, except when installing new software. (I’m still having probs with Audacity for instance.)
I’d install linux on the big laptop if I didn’t find downloading podcasts through I-Tunes so bloody convenient.
VM is certainly a very useful development technique. The clean install is worth it even if you don’t need multiple operating systems. Only money and time have prevented me from doing it so far. You do, after all, have to pay a license for each Windows machine you have installed, even if they are all on the same physical device.
My business partner has been running Ubuntu in VMWare for the last year, and as she has recently bought a new PC she’s made the jump to a Linux (Ubuntu again) box. Things to watch out for:
Hardware compatibility. She has a bog-standard Creative soundcard on the new Dell machine that turns out not to be supported on Ubuntu. (No sound on a laptop may or may not pose a problem for you; it does for her as she is partially sighted and uses a screen reader.) At least with Dells you know in advance what’s inside the box and can check in advance for compatibility.
The other thing that’s turned out to be a big annoyance is that like you we do a lot of remote work and trying to get Ubuntu to support Checkpoint VPNs has been a struggle. As this is a lengthy story, I won’t go into it now as I don’t know if your clients use them. If so, I can elaborate if that would be helpful.
I’m certainly nervous about hardware. With the desktop I’m only really worried about the network card and printers. If I buy a laptop it will be one with Ubuntu installed, which I hope means it works with everything on board, so again only printers would be an issue.
Kevin uses VPN for work. That’s enough to let me know I should never have anything to do with it. And in any case I will need to keep a Windows machine for work.
I’m currently wondering whether I should bite the bullet and install the Ubuntu server edition on the desktop here. I suspect I need to in order to run Subversion. So maybe we’ll actually have our own server and domain here. Hmm… “menacetofandom.com”?
Of course – it never occurred to me that you could get a machine with Ubuntu preinstalled. (Possibly because a) Dell in New Zealand only offer other flavours of Linux and b) in fact, they don’t even do that. Customer service cheerfully informed us that even though they say on their website that they offer Linux boxes they actually, uh, don’t. Sigh.) That will deal with any hardware issues, of course.
If you’d like to have a go at Linux without committing yourself totally, Microsoft now give away Virtual PC for free. It’s not supposed to be as good as VMWare, but then it’s not VMWare’s price, either.
It’s not necessary to use the Ubuntu server edition to have a Subversion repository — the Subversion installation packages are very easy to install in the desktop edition as well.
If a pre-installed Ubuntu is not an absolute requirement, I hear installing it on Lenovo Thinkpads is a snap, with no hassles reported in any of the later models of either the hardware or the OS.
Thanks Tero, that’s good to know. Presumably I can also download the LAMP installation if the desktop edition of Ubuntu doesn’t come with it.
The real question, however, is whether I’ll be able to access the Subversion installation from my Windows development machine if it isn’t on a server. There’s no point in having it if I can’t upload source code to it easily.
I have an Asus Eee 4G, it is super portable. Since I’m mostly a Red Hat/CentOS sysadmin, I installed EeeDora (slightly modified Fedora 8) on it. It works very nicely.
I’m also using a portable DVD player case to carry it in. Cheap and works well. Extra wallwart power supplies are available from Asus for $15.
You can have the Subversion server set up identically and access it exactly the same way no matter which edition of Ubuntu you use.
Unlike Windows, the Ubuntu server and desktop editions are basically just different configurations for pre-installed software — there’s no difference in the OS itself. The server edition basically has the different server components, but lacks a graphical UI (and installer), and vice versa for the desktop edition. By installing the missing packages to either, you will end up with the same configuration.
I’d say if you are going to use the potential Ubuntu machine directly (and not only via remote connection), or if you like graphical installer tools, go with the desktop edition.
If you choose to buy a new laptop (other than eee), the best way to avoid hardware compatibility problems is to go all-Intel (intel CPU, chipset, graphics and wireless).
It will work out-of-the-box on any modern linux distribution.
Thanks for the continuing good advice, folks. The current plan is to try installing the desktop version of Ubuntu on the spare machine here over the weekend, and to buy an Asus. The latter is apparently easier said than done. US stores don’t seem to like them. Fry’s don’t appear to stock them at all, and Best Buy will only sell them over their web site. Looks like a job for Amazon.
And then I get to have More Fun With Networking. (I know, it wouldn’t be so hard if I didn’t have Windows machines.)