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I’ve been using Linux on servers in various flavours since 1997, but I am relatively new to Ubuntu and I have just started using Ubuntu as a desktop OS. Despite some installation problems, the overall experience was very positive. I had made earlier attempts to switch over to Linux, but for one or another reason these were thwarted, mostly because of the professional necessity of testing software under Windows. Since I am now working on cross-platform applications that particular constraint has evaporated. I spend most of my day developing software and writing documentation. Before installing Ubuntu, I was slightly concerned that there would be a temporary decrease in productivity due to having to learn new software. However, this turned out to be largely unfounded.

Most of the key applications like Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice work exactly the same under Linux as they do under Windows. The only major change was replacing Notepad++ (which only runs on Windows) by vi/vim. These editors are suitable for programming in situations where you don’t want to fire up an IDE. Furthermore, I have made some customisations to ease the transition, which I’d like to share with you. If you are new to Linux, you might find one or another useful for your own work. The following list is by no means exhaustive or even comprehensive, just a number of things I stumbled across during my first two weeks with desktop Ubuntu.

Repositories and download servers
Ubuntu maintains software packages with the Synaptic package manager. Because as a new user you are likely to make frequent use of this tool, one of the most useful things to do is to optimise its usage. This involves defining the repositories and the download server. Choose System/Administration/Software Sources from the main menu. In the first tab “Ubuntu Software”, select the four items marked with “main”, “universe”, “restricted” and “multiverse” for the widest choice of software packages. Next, optimise the download server. I wasted a whole day with downloading the 9.04->9.10 update, because of a slow server. Ubuntu can find the fastest server for you. Select “Other…” in the “Download from” dropdown-box. A dialogue with a list of servers shows on screen. Click on “Select Best Server” to let Ubuntu test all available servers for their response time and select the fastest one.

Keyboard and language customisations
If you are -like me- frequently typing text in different languages, chances are that the default language and keyboard settings will not suit you. Fortunately, Ubuntu is easy to configure for international use, possibly even superior to Windows in this regard. First, I added Thai language support in System/Administration/Language Support. Then I configured two additional keyboard layouts, German and Thai, in System/Preferences/Keyboard/Layout. As I am using a Thai/English keyboard, I have to remember the German key mapping by heart which is only of limited use. On Windows I got used to producing international characters by typing ALT+num key sequences. On Linux, this is even easier thanks to the concept of the compose key. In the keyboard layout dialogue, click on “Layout Options” which will show you a number of intricate keyboard customisation options. Click on “Compose key position” and pick a key, for instance “Right Alt”. Now you can use this key to compose international characters. For example, type right Alt, double quotation marks, and letter ‘u’ to produce the German Umlaut ‘ü’. Type right Alt, backtick and the letter ‘a’ to produce the accent grave ‘à’. Voilà!

Customising Nautilus
Nautilus is the Linux/Gnome equivalent to the Windows Explorer. In fact, I find it to be superior to the latter, because it supports protocols for remote access (such as ftp/sftp); it offers better search capability and better support for compressed files. If you prefer to work with a GUI rather than the command line, you would probably want to customise Nautilus in some way. The most obvious candidates for customisation are probably file associations. These can be defined by right-clicking on a file, selecting “Properties” from the context menu and switching to the “Open With” tab in the property dialogue. Here you can define alternative applications to use for opening a file, as well as the default application that is started upon double-click. If you need even more customisation options, install the package named “nautilus-actions”. This package lets you define custom actions for file entries in Nautilus which can be incorporated into the context menu. Predefined Nautilus extensions (aka shell extensions) for various file display and transformation purposes are also available.

Command line and terminal customisations
Ubuntu comes with the bash (Bourne again shell) and the Gnome-Terminal as command line defaults. These are fine for me. However, there is one feature which I found missing in the terminal application. It is not possible to search the output buffer. For example, when I run applications that produce a large amount of diagnostic output, there is no intuitive way to search trough this data, other than piping it into a command like “less”. I have found a little program named “screen” which appears to solve this problem. After “screen” is started, virtual sessions can be created within the same terminal window, each with its own searchable buffer. “Screen” involves remembering some arcane keyboard commands, but that’s the best I could find so far. Another command line annoyance is that the “vi” editor runs in compatible mode by default. This will let the cursors keys produce character output in insert mode; in other words, the cursor keys are broken. There is an easy fix for this, however. Put a file named .vimrc in your home directory that contains a single line saying “set nocompatible” and the cursor keys will work again.

Backup and antivirus software
Surprisingly, neither backup nor antivirus software packages are included in the default Ubuntu installation. Although viruses are probably not an immediate threat on a Linux system, I would rather not breed any of them on my machine. There is the open source software clamAV as well as a number of free-for-private-use commercial offerings for Linux. I am still evaluating antivirus software. So far I found clamAV and AVG quite usable, but not quite as convenient as under Windows. Backup software is an absolute necessity in my opinion, and I am surprised that it isn’t integrated in the original Ubuntu installation. Of course, individual backup needs differ, but a simple mirroring and archiving facility is probably required for even the most basic usage. Initially, I planned to hack a script based on rsync together for that purpose, but I have found something much nicer. The “backintime” package lets you create incremental backups with great ease and minimal storage requirements. Backintime revolves around the concept of snapshots; it is a GUI framework for rsync, diff, and cron. I highly recommend it.

Another year has passed in the Eclipse universe, and this means another minor release number and another Jupiter moon. Eclipse has moved from 3.4 to 3.5 or respectively from Ganymede to Galileo. Using a small gap in my busy development schedule, I decided to install the latest version this morning. Thanks to broadband Internet, the 180 MB JEE package was downloaded in a breeze and installed in a few minutes. Unfortunately, that’s where things stopped being easy.

When I downloaded the PDT plugin for PHP development, I found a bug in it that prevented Eclipse from creating a PHP project from existing sources. After some research on the Internet, I found that this was a well-documented bug which had been fixed in the meantime. I tried installing the latest PDT release via the Eclipse install & update feature, but the process came to a crashing halt with a message that demanded some mylyn jars that could not be found. Although I had no idea why PDT required that particular jar, I dutifully installed the mylyn plugins with the required version number.

Unfortunately, this did not impress Galileo, as it now demanded other jars when installing the PDT update. - Perhaps a case of workspace pollution, I thought. - Clearly, it was time for a fresh start. I scrapped the installation and started anew with a blank workspace and a new install location. This time, everything seemed to install fine. I was able to create Java and PHP projects. However, Galileo suddenly wouldn’t open *.xml, *.xsl, or *.html files any more. It complained that there was no editor for this content type, which appeared fishy since both web tools (WTP) and PDT were installed. I tried to solve the problem by playing around with the configuration, but to no avail.

After several fresh attempts and considerable time spent with looking up error messages on the Internet, I decided to stay with Ganymede. Since I had wasted my entire morning and since I had some real work to do as well, this seemed to be the best course of action. Maybe I will give Galileo another go when an updated distro package becomes available. With Ganymede I never ran into this sort of trouble, despite having PDT, WTP, the Scala plugin and Jboss tools installed. I am still clueless as to what went wrong and I wonder if anybody else had a similar experience.

I have been a Linux fan for more than a decade. I used Linux in my own company and projects since 1996  and I was also one of the founding members of the Bangkok Linux User Group. Oddly however, the computer on my desktop still runs on Windows. It’s a glaring contradiction. I’ve wanted to replace Windows for years. There’s always been a reason not to, mainly because I need to test software under Windows for my customers. Last weekend, the XP installation on my laptop “forgot” my user account and with it all account data. Simultaneously, the file system started to behave funny. “Ah, a sign from above,” I thought. “Finally the day has come, I will install Ubuntu on my laptop.” So I did. Ubuntu Dekstop 9.04 was installed with ease and -even more impressively- it recognised all of my Thinkpad hardware. Even the Wifi connection was up and running without fiddling about.

I should have said “almost all” hardware. Unfortunately one piece of hardware refused cooperation with Linux, namely my Novatel USB modem. Since I’ve come to rely on 3G mobile Internet, this is a knockout criterion. No modem, no Internet. After hours of scouring the Web for possible solutions and  trying out various settings, I gave up in frustration. There wasn’t anything I could do except zapping the Linux partition and installing old friend XP. To attenuate my disappointment, I will make it a dual boot machine, though. Note to hardware vendors: please take Linux seriously and provide drivers for your nifty electronics. That would make life much easier. I guess I have to postpone my switch-over to Linux for another year. Hopefully I will be able to resist the urge to buy another piece of exotic hardware in the meantime.