Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric" with a Gnome 2 Feel

I love, and am maybe even a little addicted to the packages Ubuntu includes in their distributions. But like many, I am dissatisfied with the new Unity interface because:

1. I can't open two copies of KeePassX at once
2. I hate using text search to find applications
3. It was too hard to create a custom application launcher

Hopefully all that will change, but until then, it's just not working for me.

I tried the LXDE desktop, but:

1. I didn't like the default software (Leafpad text editor, Galculator, LX terminal)
2. Desktop integration is lacking (no screen-shots, limited drag and drop from one application to another)

It's a very new distribution and may need a year or two to catch up.  Certainly LXDE is worth keeping an eye on, but it's not there yet.

What's currently working for me is a "retro" basic Gnome session based on OMG Ubuntu's article, Make Ubuntu 11.10 Look and Feel Like GNOME 2. Thanks to "DigalMan" for pointing it out to me. That article has a typo though, it's gnome-session-fallback, not gnome-fallback-session.

Also, when they say, "Add ‘ppa:jconti/gnome3‘ to your Software Sources" their instructions don't include how to add the PPA's key, so that future updates are not be applied properly (or at all). Fortunately, launchpad.net has instructions. The key lines I needed were:

sudo add-apt-repository http://ppa.launchpad.net/jconti/gnome3/ubuntu
sudo apt-get update

It's not perfect (the top-bar color's not quite right and the icons space themselves wider apart when hovered over), but I'm basically back with the Ubuntu system I have loved for years, with the latest versions of all software. If this works in 12.04, I'll probably stick with it. If not, and LXDE has not improved by that time, I'll guess I'll try Mint.

Settling in to Ubuntu Linux

I'm surprised at how much I like Ubuntu Linux better than Windows! The UI is basically the same, only everything is faster. Especially when you do anything to a file (write to it, read from it, move it, or delete it), Linux turns hours into Minutes. When you consider that doing anything useful on a computer generally involves changing a file, that says a lot!

Printing to a network printer was actually easier on Linux. Our vendor-supplied proprietary Windows driver hangs the printer every second or third time you try to print a PDF! I've got my complaints (a few sound limitations and a few software packages that I still have to run in a Windows VM). But whenever I have to fix someone's Windows computer I pity them. Even Windows runs better on Linux (in a VM). That way you can keep working while you reboot, reboot, reboot...

As I'm writing this, I can hear my wife downstairs using Windows... "Network Problems!?! I can't have network problems right now! Operation failed???" I feel sorry for her, I've been there myself, but I have to laugh at the background to this blog post.

I encouraged some people I know who are absolute beginners with computers to buy Macs. But now I'm not so sure. Ubuntu Linux is actually easier to navigate in some ways than a Mac.

Update 2010-04-01: I spent 2 hours trying to copy some pictures from a camera to the hard drive on a Mac and it was awful. In Ubuntu, your camera gets mounted as a drive and you can drag and drop the pictures wherever you want them.

The only drawback to running Linux is that some programs only run on Windows. Screen sharing programs (except for TeamViewer) all require Windows or Mac. The latest version of Microsoft Office only runs on Windows, Photoshop only runs on Windows/Mac, and Proprietary VPNs only run on Windows. Most people don't need those things, but I do, so I have to run Windows in a Virtual Machine. But I only have my VM running about 25% of the time.

Windows in a Virtual Machine

My Windows XP SP3 CD came in the mail yesterday. This time around I did a more-or-less default install in VirtualBox with 20GB expanding drive, 1.2GB memory, 24M video memory, and audio disabled. Instead of Symantec Antivirus, I tried ESET NOD32. I also disabled Adobe Drive this time because I got some weird messages. The install and all setup took about 8 hours, much of which was waiting, which is much more reasonable than the 3 days my previous attempt took.

The new image uses only about 6GB of disk space instead of 15, presumably because it doesn't contain any junk from my old hard drive. It is immeasurably faster than my 140GB image of my previous hard drive, half-of which was unreadable. Not sure how much was VM settings, Symantec, or other junk, but I think everything helped.

I deleted the old virtual hard drive image. It took hours because I had a dozen huge "snapshots" I had taken in VirtualBox, each of which took 1-20 minutes to delete. Before I started, my new 1TB drive was 60% full. Now it's only 7% full! What a disaster that was.

I currently use Windows in VirtualBox a few times a week for the following, but I work mostly in Linux:

Photoshop CS4

I use this a lot and it requires 1024x768 resolution for some of the dialogs to work properly (to show the Save button). Takes a lot of resources, but as much as I love GIMP, it's not a substitute for Photoshop for professional work.

A couple of proprietary VPNs

The nice thing about running these in a virtual machine is that it lets me check email and access the web from my primary OS while the VPN is connected.

Citrix GoToMeeting

Works great

Remote Desktop Connection

Necessary for work.

Internet Explorer

Necessary for work (for testing)

Microsoft Office

Open Office is a fantastic substitute. It changes the layout only slightly I think because the available fonts are different on Linux. I still need the real thing for presentations and testing for work.

Firefox HTML Validator plug-in

I really wish there was a Linux version of this!

Hopefully, over time, things like GoToMeeting and the Firefox HTML Validator will work on Linux. I'm still looking for a secure backup strategy for my entire drive.

Moving from Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux this "Weekend"

Sat, Sep 19, 2009

6 PM

Bought a Western Digital 1TB Caviar (Green) drive and 4GB memory. I wanted to keep the old drive untouched in case there were issues with the install.

10:02 PM

new hard drive installed, Ubuntu install begun. I almost went with Xubuntu, but the display got messed up in VirtualBox when I applied patches. I think Ubuntu is going to be more reliable/compatible and that's even more important to me than performance.

11:53 PM

sent first email from new system using Google Chrome! I spent one of those 2 hours googling and thinking about partitioning before deciding to let the installer do what it wanted. Finally I clicked "OK" about 5 times and in 20 minutes it was done. Ran the updater, rebooted, added and removed some programs; another 20 minutes total. Really, it couldn't have been easier.

Sun, Sep 20, 2009

10:13 AM

Massive frustration. So far, it looks like installing Windows is going to be the hardest part of installing Linux. All I can find is an XP Home edition upgrade CD from 2004.

Microsoft doesn't sell XP any more. The Windows 7 beta download program has ended and you can't buy it until October 22nd (or thereabouts). What you can buy (for $300) is Windows Vista Professional Non-Upgrade with a "free" download of Windows 7 when it's released so you don't have to miss out on upgrading, patching, and being the first to find bugs. Even if that sounded good, I can't buy it now because the Windows store doesn't open until noon. Tech support isn't open either.

I decided to follow the instructions here:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

It looked good, but it's not the easiest, or necessarily the best way. Read on...

4:01 PM

Booting a 150GB image of my old Windows hard drive. Woohoo!

4:06 PM

Windows asks for a key code. I copy it off the sticker on the side of my computer. It doesn't take it. I call in and punch the numbers over the pone. No luck.

It turns out that it wouldn't let me re-register because I have an OEM version that was pre-installed on the drive and the virtual machine had different "hardware" then it was expecting. Maybe I could have faked the bios, the MAC address, the hardware, and I'm not sure what else in order to satisfy XP that I wasn't trying to install it on a different PC. I'm installing it on the same PC, so it's legal, but it's in a virtual machine, so I couldn't be sure the hardware would ever match. At this point I gave up and installed my XP Home Upgrade from 2004 over the XP Pro image because the upgrade has to be installed over an existing version of Windows (apparently it doesn't have to be a validated version).

The install kept the files on the C:\ drive, but it overwrote the My Documents folder and left my old home directory inaccessible. Using CACLs showed it to be owned by WINDOWS NT/my-old-id. I was able to make it readible, but couldn't delete anything. I began deleting my now useless applications but it was taking hours. The solution? Boot the VM into Ubuntu and delete them from Nautilus. It took minutes. How can Microsoft charge $300 for an operating system when a free one has a 100 times faster file system?

8:01 PM

Windows XP home is installed and works. Beginning "Windows Update."

8:29 PM

Installed vpnc, which connects to a Cisco VPN from the Linux command line. Nice! XP is still applying updates.

9:10PM

Windows updates, updates, updates. 50 at once this time.

Mon, Sep 21, 2009

8:24 AM

Windows XP home was finally upgraded to SP3 around midnight last night after many reboots, and lots of clicking and waiting. Installed VirtualBox Guest Additions this morning which was quite easy.

Noonish

Had a work call that wanted to use Citrix GoToMeeting. I accidentally laughed out loud at the suggestion (it was a little akward). But within 5 minutes I had the Citrix client installed on Windows and thanks to VirtualBox GuestAdditions I was looking at a full-screen screen-share without any noticeable lag or any issue whatsoever. Nice!

At some point I called Microsoft to find out my options. This took about 4 calls. One of which was a voice recognition system that couldn't recognize a thing I said. later I played "20 questions" with an automated voice response system that put me on hold for 10 minutes. When I finally got a human, the response was, "If you got your operating system with a computer, call that computer's manufacturer, not us." and "We don't sell Windows XP. Want to buy Vista?"

I called Lenovo and they could only offer a CD of the original drive image for $45, but I would have had the same hardware vs. validation issues in VirtualBox.

Tue, Sep 22, 2009

4:35 PM

I'm basically Done. XP upgraded so SP3, Office 2003 installed and upgraded to SP3, Norton Internet Security installed and upgraded, 2 VPNs installed on Windows. I tried to compress the virtual drive image to no avail. They aren't really designed to have their size changed. There's inaccessible or otherwise useless little bits of junk spread out on the drive image (some are unmovable by a defragment) which probably kept it from compressing. At one point, I ran some program on my XP image that was supposed to fill the drive with zeros (to make the image compress better) by making a big enough text file with each character being the null character. It was supposed to delete the file when finished, but presumably your computer would crash about the same time once the drive was full, but it was running so slowly that I killed it and never got to see.

I thought I'd just write a little script that piped the small file of zeros many times into a new file until the machine crashed. But you can't pipe like that in DOS. I downloaded sdelete instead. It took about 5 hours for it to write 140GB of zeros.

While I was waiting for Windows/Office to install, I installed my development environment and got all my Linux apps up and running.

Mon, Oct 5, 2009

11:27 AM

I've installed Photoshop and Cygwin on Windows in the last week. They work fine, but Photoshop really needs the full-screen 1024x768. I might have to get a real graphics card and bigger monitor.

Had to share encrypted WinZip archives with Windows users. Installed PeaZip and it encrypted/decrypted zipped/unzipped WinZip files perfectly. Everything works so much faster than on Windows. There was definitely pain involved in making the switch, but it's also definitely paying off.

Lessons Learned:

1. A new hard drive was a great idea. I could pop the old one out of the machine and be sure I wasn't deleting anything important by accident. I wouldn't try an upgrade like this without a blank drive.


2. A Windows XP Pro SP3 CD would have been a godsend. I still might get one and reinstall to bring the disk image size down to about 10GB instead of almost 150 and to be rid of any lingering junk on the drive.


3. Dropbox and KeePass make managing online accounts across machines really, really easy.


4. I did the right thing. I was really unsure about it. But consider:
   
   1. I was able to be up and running on Linux FOR FREE in 2 hours (would have been 1 if I didn't second-guess the installer for an hour). The XP install took 2 days (would have been 1 if I paid $130 for a disk which Amazon, not Microsoft sells).
   
   
   2. Deleting big files on Windows was incredibly slow. Rebooting into Linux running off a CD (inside the same VirtualBox VM) turned hours into minutes or less.
   
   
   3. Support: If I actually had a support question (not a pre-sales question), I would have had to pay Microsoft $45 to ask it. The Mac Ads are very funny, but they are accurate in this case. I can get on Freenode IRC for free and have virtually any (polite, pre-researched, well worded) question answered in about 10 minutes, and probably learn something else interesting while I'm there.
   
   
   4. My whole system is much, much faster. Startup is in about 20 seconds as opposed to 3 minutes. Suspend (sleep) takes about 2 seconds, waking up takes 5-10. The wake-up on Windows often took 5 minutes!
   
   
   5. In this process I expected to discover that Linux wasn't ready for prime time. Instead I discovered a lot of negative things about Windows and a lot of positive things about Linux!
   
   

Conclusion

I'm installing Photoshop now on Windows so a Windows VM is probably here to stay, but I would be very surprised if I ever switched back.

If Google comes out with a killer Netbook operating system this fall, more people will use Linux. If Windows 7 forces developers to rewrite their apps, and if people have to run XP in a virtual machine to use older applications, they can do that just as well on Linux (or Mac) and have a better, faster, more secure host operating system. All this adds up to Windows having a smaller market share and developers having more reason to come out with a OS-X and/or Linux port of their software. If they use a toolkit like GTK+ (free) instead of Microsoft Visual Studio (very expensive), it shouldn't be such a big deal to run on all three operating systems. At least for me, the future looks a lot more like Linux and less like Microsoft.