Here is a question for ya. What are the first things you add to a Ubuntu install? For me, I do the update thing. I notice that it takes about 250mb of data to do the upgrade now. I also add in a few applications which I tend to use a lot. Stuff like ssh so I get a server, inkscape so I can draw pretty (useless) stuff, xchat so I can waste time on freenode, and pidgin because I don’t like the one bundled at all. I also install Adobe Air because I really like tweetdeck for twitter. I also have to do an apt-get install openvpn and then ubuntu-restricted-extras so I can listen to mp3s. I usually get done with setting up something in about an hour and work has some decent network connectivity so over lunch I do the big upgrades. I end up with VirtualBox and then rebooting to get the new kernel revision in place.

Now what is the first thing you add to a Windows 7 install? I always have to get rid of the senseless and stupid Internet Exploder 8 which always seems to border on the heights and depths of stupidity. Give me Firefox or give me Opera! I actually don’t really like Opera that much either; but Google Chrome is cool. Then the box seems to want to do updates. It reboots. It does more updates and I install office 2007 professional plus from my technet account. Then it reboots. I end up adding in some open source windows programs or freebies that make Windows easier. I always need Cygwin so I can have a real terminal to type commands into, have ssh on the command line, rsync, etc. I end up installing AVG Free and a VNC client. It reboots some more. Sometimes I think Windows just likes reboots and that you really don’t need to reboot after installing things. Why do you have to reboot anyways? What is it that Windows really needs to do? I think it should pop up a message that says,

Windows 7 is tired and is pissed off at you for making its registry huge. Download a registry repair program that has malware attached immediately!

Yeah baby! Anyways, I actually like Windows 7 and use it on a T60 every day now for work. Its much nicer than Vista. But how much is that really saying? Lets be serious here. Vista had serious suckage power. If Windows 7 is nicer does it tip the scale to the positive side or just borderline? Even if its much, much nicer; its still not nice. After all, its Windows.

So, that’s my story for the day and you made it through the whole thing. You should be proud. I usually post inane BS on this thing and this was no exception.

I can hear folks. Why go to all the work to install cygwin, hack on an rxvt terminal when Windows 7 ships with Powershell? There are at least three reasons. One is familiarity. I grok the Bash thing much better and I can edit a simple file like .bashrc and make it do different things. Second is I get a few other tools by bending Cygwin to my will. Tools like ssh, rsync. These are significant to my everyday computing and makes this Windows 7 toy more like a grown up OS. Third is; lets face it. The Windows CMD terminal sucks. It always has. Then Monash or Powershell or whatever came along. I don’t get it. Back to number 1 I guess. Familiarity. Anyways, now on my Windows 7 laptop, I have access to these tools that I sorely miss on Windows and its easy to get things going. If you want to see how to bend RXVT to your every will and desire, check
this page out. It does it all and some more.

I also get a full-bodied terminal shell environment from which to manage/mangle directories and files, run windows programs, etc. You can type into rxvt names of Windows programs and they just launch. Very useful. I also don’t got to learn Powershell scripting which seems to take a lifetime of learning. Tell ya what. I’ll settle for BASH, BASH completions, RXVT on the Windows desktop. You can learn Powershell.

Mkay?

rsync – what a basic thing this is; but man. Ask any Unix guy and rsync is in his toolchest. My friend Gaylen knows the command line switches better than most. The magic you can make happen with copying, sync’ing, backing up; is nothing short of amazing.

openSSH – what more can be said? This is one industrial workhorse that can tunnel, create, maintain, and manage remote systems in a few ways. We just take it for granted most times you know; but there it is kinda silently managing itself as a network service, giving us secure access, letting us tunnel to remote systems.

screen – You know the need if you use a remote system via ssh. You want to run this lengthy operation and you want to leave it running while you run to BevMo for beer or get yourself home after a busy day in the fields of Colo. You need a tool which plain delivers that service and lets you throw something off in the background, get it back, list all of them running. I do this now when I want to copy a file at home when at work.

The great thing with these three little guys is that they are not little. The jobs they can do are remarkable. Combine them in unique ways and you can start huge backups on a remote server and not be tied to the console. Go ahead and get that beer or get away from the colo. Finally, for these not so glamorous toolkits you will have to pay a huge price of absolutely nothing.

I’m only mentioning these things because on a Ubuntu system you freshly install you get all these things by default. On my Debian testing box, screen was not there by default. One other thing which is so basic but forms how I interact almost every day with Linux is the command-line tool apt. The remarkable thing is from some reading this was only meant as a limited concept type thing to show the strength of the debian package manager. This really separates out the continuing pain and anguish of Windows updates that i feel at time and the rather simple way of dealing with the updates on Ubuntu or Debian. Combine this with some of the newer functionality like adding PPA repositories on the command-line in Ubuntu, maintaining applications easily with custom repositories, managing how and when applications are update or not (see pinning).

My little list of free tools makes how I interact with a computer easier, quicker, more secure. When I used to work at data centers a lot, they all meant the difference between hours of painstakingly installing Windows applications and using some GUI nonsense versus getting on with the work and getting something done. None of these can be done by simply installing them and some would argue they have counter-intuitive switches and uses. Let me say to this; that you have to learn on Linux. Productivity does not come by clicking on a MSI and being a good consumer. Linux requires you to be a well-informed user and actually do some learning, poking, trying. My take on Windows if you want a point and click world, welcome to the world that Steve built. If you want to learn how things work, Linux can guide you. But you will have to put forth a bit of effort.

The truth is that none of these things are done on a computer using Windows 7 as a real operating system. Its all virtual folks. Its all part of this huge VDI file that VirtualBox manages. It parses that file when I boot Windows 7. It gives me the best parts of Windows (yes, there are good parts). I joked today that I saw a youtube video once about a Windows GUI tool that was a wizard that had 97 next pages. At the end, no matter what you answered it said, FAILED. Ain’t this just like Windows though? You all know that its broken and it has been broken and it always will be broken. The paradigm is that a modern graphical user interface is required to do things and you have to click NEXT and then either DONE or APPLY. What is the f’in difference with DONE and APPLY? I mean I don’t get why I would go through all that and still have a choice. I mean, doesn’t DONE do the same thing as APPLY?

So what works better you may ask? Well Ubuntu works better. Its the real host underlying all my fun on Windows 7. It takes its licking and keeps on ticking. It installs updates, deals with different networks, takes my USB devices. But, as others have noted, its not for the faint of heart. Its difficult. Why do people believe that I wonder? Well, its not made for Joe Average desktop user. You have to be technically savvy to use it.

So what’s the point? There is no point. Windows sucks and Ubuntu does not. Linux sucks and Windows does not. Its like the tools thing I have said before. We use tools that build what we need out. We are the habilis users of the universe. Tally up what you need and make a choice. I can live with Windows virtually because it ain’t good enough to be real. And I’m lazy. Too damned lazy to want malware and antivirus and alerts and registry keys and control panels.

Take it from there folks and build your reality.

Bug suckers anyone?

Using Dropbox I can use whatever I want now and not worry about where my documents are. It compiles nice and clean on Debian testing with no real changes besides adding in some other applications interactively using “apt-get”. What a wondrous tool guys! it always amazes me at what it does, how it makes Windows look stupid and foolish; but yet its under-stated in its simplicity of adding, removing, and dealing with packages on my system. Windows and its antiquated MSI and EXE files, downloading using a browser, clicking on an installer package. Phew. What a mess. I’ll take the command terminal approach where I type in a command like “apt-get install easytag” and it gets that package and the dependencies all at one time. For those that say how hard Linux is and why Windows just works better; I’ll leave it to you to demonstrate how you add applications to a working system. How many reboots you got to do after upgrading something as sinister as Java or Adobe Reader on Windows? Sublime dudes.

Its a question of productivity; but for me happiness. I am happier using Linux. It just works. I am not happy using windows. So it must not work As I’ve mentioned before, I do use Windows in carefully controlled situations. Virtual guests running Windows with snapshots deployed. Then I run Outlook and Internet Exploder in the VM environment. its safe that way and I get the extreme gooey goodness of MS Exchange 2007. What a wondrous, rich, and textured environment that is.

Not.

I remember at Linuxcare mentioning this to Rick Moen. Rick told me to get myself over to Debian instead. I was the manager/director of a business unit then called Linuxcare Labs where we did hardware compatibility testing for Dell, IBM, and others. So I installed Debian Potato or something. Remember Debian is named after Toy Story characters! I loved it. I could venture between the stable and unstable branches and most often just went to unstable because it was more fun to live on the edge than with the staid old stable stuff. Then this middle ground came along called “testing”. Well, testing was quite interesting since I could just stay there throughout the experience by not making any changes to my /etc/apt/sources.list file really. I lost track of releases and just tracked testing.

Then this new brown baby came along. Linux for Humans based on Debian. Releases every 6 months. Wow! I noticed a bunch of names there that I had seen in bug reports on debian prime. Exciting then! I joined up some time ago and started tracking the every 6 month cycle. My impressions of Ubuntu have always been that its focused on the user interaction, making new users feel more comfortable, finding ways to provide stability and experimentation both. But for me, its made me lazy. The Windows releases come and go. There is Vista, XP, Server something or other. They all require the same TLC. They all get infected and need to be burped. They all have butte ugly GUIs which tire me. I like doing things with CLI applications. They make me instantly more productive. My favorite CLI applications have to be things like VIM, rsync, screen. But there are others that I use like clamz which does amazon mp3 downloads in a more easy style for me. Command Line aplications fill a void where I want to get something done and don’t need to click NEXT -> NEXT -> NEXT. Then this confusing final screen. Why do they offer Apply and Done. If I already clicked on 9 NEXTs why would I not want to apply the changes. Holy Craps. I think 50% of the time these GUIs are a waste of f’ing time and just slow me up with than speed me up.

Now I am at the 10.04 release of Ubuntu and I’m still loving it. With an apple, you’re a consumer, with a windows system you are just borrowing the OS, but with a Linux box you own. Most of all you use. Using and consuming are different activity levels. I am at 2010, personal relationships fail or have issues. But Ubuntu is there for me and my extreme slothfulness.

Travel Notes

I am in the middle of travel momentum at the moment, resting and residing in Chennai. Its Friday and I have about 6 days left on this trip. Last night I went to the Hotel New Woodlands Krishna restaurant for dinner and then to the Savera Hotel for a beer. Ended up having a few more beers up on the roof at the Raintree. Chennai always treats me quite good and restaurants, things to do, places to go abound. Tonite I will most likely head to Zara for a few cold adult beverages and some spanish tapas food. I’ve decided this weekend to really not get anything of consequence done at all. I’m simply going to do nothing at all and kick back with the Kindle, music, the hotel comfort.

That’s about all I can report today. Stay tuned for weekend meanderings as usual with no real point at all

Guy with a Dell laptop: What is that?
Me: What is what?
Guy: What you are running on that laptop?
Me: This is Ubuntu
Guy: I could never use Linux. It does not have the tools I need
Me: Okay well here is Windows 7

The guy stops and stares for a moment. His questions fire by. How are you doing that? Is that real? Is that just a picture?

I click on icons, start LookOut for exchange email, start Word 2007. He just stares. Is it possible to run two operating systems on a single computer? Well, of course you can. You could even run Linux on your Windows computer and not have to interrupt things.

He asks how. We discuss. He starts looking at me doing company email using LookOut 2007 in VirtualBox. He shakes his head as if to clear fluff.

I change the subject and ask what he does for a living. He does sales for a non technical company. His laptop is used to manage contact lists, search for things, do email. He does not like Vista. Vista, he says, sucks. It crashes once a week. How often does Linux crash? Well, I say, I don’t really remember the last time it did; but Windows 7 is like any ole windows but its just virtualized so it will go down when it gets unhappy.

He just laughs. I laugh. I show him how to download VirtualBox and where to get images for VirtualBox online. He finishes his coffee and thanks me. He is now more interested in his computer and steals one last look at how i do things. I show him one other trick. I add a package that has a few dependencies with one command in a terminal window; then I start it up all ready to go.

Try that on Windows…

This is my Windows 7 desktop with Outlook 2007 running.

Cool, eh?

Then this is my Ubuntu desktop and you can see a little miniature Windows 7 image there in GIMP.

This is on the same Ubuntu Linux box at the same time. How do I do this you may wonder. No big tricks or treats here.

1. I set the Windows 7 guest to run fullscreen when it starts.
2. I assign CTRL keys to do keyboard shortcuts for switching desktops.
3. I turn off VirtualBox managing the keystroke in the preferences menu.

Now when I strike CTRL 2 I get Windows. When I do CTRL 1 I get Linux. This seems to me to be a good productive way to work. I also suspend laptops with this going and it call just comes back each time. This gives me an entire desktop of Windows (probably more than I can take without getting tired of it) and my familiar Ubuntu Karmic desktop which is more functional, with xterms blazing, applications running, etc.

You too can become a habilis with operating systems! Use the tools that will take you close. Virtualization software works wonders these days for business uses.