The BigLig Thinks

Printing is fixed - I didn't have the authentication set up correctly. I had to do some work that involves editing a pile of spreadhseets, and OpenOffice handled it perfectly. It couldn't evaluate a complex formula I use on one, but it behaved well and didn't alter it, which is enough since I don't need to see the contents of that field, but others do.
Actually doing productive work on my system today, which has reassured me. Late yesterday I was wondering if the lack of polish in some areas was going to prove to be the next sticking point.

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Now that the system is installed, a day of tweaking. I won't go into boring detail, just some hints for myself the next time I have to do this. On the whole, thanks to apt-get, most things were easier than the internet led me to expect.

• The system does not seem to automatically switch to the active ethernet card, so do it manually.
• Firefox needs manual updating to 1.5, but this is easy and well documented.
• The 855resolution utility lets you fool X into using the 1400x1050 screen properly.
• Rhythymbox doesn't have mp3 support out of the box, so install gstreamer0.8-plugins.
• Enabling suspend is a simple matter of editing /etc/default/acpi-support and moving the commenting out from suspend to hibernate.

What still needs some work? Printing. Dual monitor display. PPTP. Netsupport is a little slow. Sending via Bluetooth (receiving is working very well). WiFi at work (which needs a WEP key)

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It occurs to me that my last post whizzed rather fast through a lot of technical details - it might be useful to make this page more useful to someone going for GNU/Linux for the first time.
Firstly, I should say that my Laptop is a Dell Lattitude D505. If you have a different brand then you will want to Google for other people's stories of installation on your particular machine.
OK, distribution choice.GNU/Linux is not like, say, Microsoft Windows, in that it is a single product. Rather, GNU/Linux is a collection of thousands of smaller pieces of software. You collect the right combination of them together, and you have a machine that does what you need.
This is incidentally why you should strictly speaking call it GNU/Linux (as I have carefully been doing), since Linux is just one of these components.
This process of deciding what bits of software you need and making sure they all talk to each other properly is a big job, but luckily various companies and organizations have already prepared several such selections, called distributions.
Ubuntu is a distribution based on the famous Debian distribution. It is a relative newcomer but is highly regarded. I like it for the apt-get tool, that makes it incredibly easy to install new software.
Partioning is the process of dividing a disk up into portions. I'm shrinking the portion that Windows XP is on to make room for GNU/Linux. This was traditionally a hairy bit of business, but worked well for me. I'm using Knoppix for this job - a CD that you can boot from that temporarily runs Linux on your computer. It's a tremendously useful tool - here it lets me use the GNU/Linux qt_parted tool to shrink the space used by Windows.
One feature of Ubuntu that has made it popular is that every 6 months the contents of the distribution are updated. The current version is code-named "Breezy Badger", but due to a flaw in my install CD I've had to install the older "Hoary Hedgehog".
Not a problem, though, thanks to apt-get. First I tell apt-get where on the net to find the software in Breezy, by changing the sources.list file and running apt-get update. Then I tell apt-get to go an upgrade all the Hoary software to the Breezy versions with apt-get dist-upgrade.

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The first step was to decide upon a distribution to use. Ubuntu is an obvious choice – I have been in love with apt-get since I first played with Debian, and Ubuntu adds to this.
Second step was partioning my disk. Back up all the data from my XP system, remove a lot of it (e.g. my iTunes library) to free up space, then defragment. Once this is done, I booted from a Knoppix CD and ran qt_parted, a graphical partioning tool. This shrunk my XP partition down by slightly over 25Gb with ease.
Boot from a Ubuntu CD and off we go. I am tremendously impressed that the install detects I have a wireless card and configures it for me. not that I need network access during the install, but it is a good omen.
Which is not that good, as after partioning (10Gb for the root, 15Gb for /home, 750Mb swap) the install fails – unable to install part of the base software. I suspect a bad write of the CD, so I dig out an older Ubuntu CD – Hoary rather than Breezy – and try that. It goes on fine.
Once it is up and running I start the process of converting to Breezy. I update the sources.list file to include Universal, and to point to Breezy, not Hoary, and run apt-get update to load these changes. Then apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade everything to the latest version. The whole thing doesn't really take that long – just long enough to write these two entries, as well as a start at an introduction to free software to put my choice in context.
Time for a reboot. My first uptime reports 2 hours and 12 minutes...

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This entry is being prepared on my laptop as usual, but what is new is that it is being done using the GNU/Linux operating system. A recent re-reading of some of Richard Stallman's work is partially to blame, but the main reason is that I now consider there is a chance that it might actually be possible to move to free software, as the critical applications I need all have solutions now.
First, Outlook. While there are dozens of mail readers available, I sometimes need to access my Exchange calendar. Now that my Exchange server is upgraded to 2003, I can use Outlook Web Access to do that. There is also a chance to get the Evolution connector working. I may still have issues accessing my mail archives – which are in PST format – but I'm sure I can think of something, and I have dual-boot if needed.

Second, Netsupport Manager, which is a remote control application (similar to PC Anywhere). This was a sticking point for a long time, but the other day I discovered, while idly playing with a Knoppix CD, that it runs very well under WINE. The fonts need some work, but it is usable.

There are other tools I use all the time – such as Word, Excel, XNView, Remote Desktop, and Firefox, but all of those have Linux versions or functional equivalents.

Holdouts like these two programs are a common reason to hold back moving to Linux on the desktop and it's nice to get past them.

Next post will report on my install experiences.

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Well, almost recovered from my cold - I had one day of wellness and promptly caught another. I was much enlivened by a late Christmas Present - Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries, in which spirit I think I might blog a few of my own cooking attempts.
At the moment my cooking is awful because I have a deeply awful kitchen. Project "Move the hell away" may help this, but meantime:
At the weekend I made a rather tasty dish - a sort of lasagne but made with gnocchi instead of pasta. It worked really well. Make some gnocchi, some "bolognese" sauce, and some cheese sauce, and layer them in a dish (b,g,b,c was the order), before baking for half an hour.
We had it both days. Cold, it was equally tasty - although a bit too chewey.
I used no oil in making the "b" and this was a sucess - trusting the non-stick coating of my pans seems to be the lesson here. This is worth bearing in mind, in the past I've found cold lasagne to be too greasy.
Tonight I just fried chunks of free-range chicken, a handful of halved, tiny mushrooms, stirred in a jar of madras sauce and lots of rice. Very nice, although as always I screwed up the timings and had to wait ages for the rice to cook well enough.

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... when HR convene a crisis meeting about the fact that your left over holiday at the end of 2005 is more than your manager's entire allowand for 2006.

Not a good sign at all...

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Although I didn't get anything I wanted for Christmas, I should say that all the gifts were given with love and so are much appreciated. But Slashdot has now revealed to me what I really do want - an IBM Model M Space Saver Keyboard. Since they haven't made them in a decade, my chances are not good. But these seem to meet my criteria for a perfect keyboard; they are perfectly ordinary keyboards, but just don't have the numeric keypad. The keypad, for me, serves no purpose except to force my mouse 4 inches to far to the right.

The more modern options are both compromises - the Logitech di Novo is an insanely expensive unit that has a removeable numeric pad, and the Happy Hacker which moves CTRL in order to make it easier for EMACS users.

I'm almost recovered from my terrible cold, so back to blogging hopefully.

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Resolutions are proving a bit irresolute so far, although I've made a good show of following one of them, the other three have not gone well. I mean, you can't really count this as a daily blog post, can you, since it comprises almost entirely of me wheezing about not having blogged anything.

Watched Channel 4's top 50 comedy moments tonight, a useful reminder that I need to buy Duck Soup and watch The Princess Bride.

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