Technology Tales

A year in the making…

It was a year ago that I set this blog on the go. Then, I was exploring the possibilities offered by WordPress.com. After some months, I decided that I wanted to make my own decisions rather than have them, so I went independent in June. Between those dates, some big launches took my attention: Windows Vista, Office 2007 & CS3 come to mind. All the while, my experience of UNIX, Oracle and other such matters kept growing more and more. In the latter half of the year, I finally made the leap from Windows to Linux on the home computing front, a decision that taught me a lot and one that I don't regret. Other subjects featured from time to time as well; my musings on web development and blogging made their appearance too. 2007 was a packed year on the technology front, and 2008 is only just getting under way. There's a Vista laptop, and I am already picking up ideas for posts, though I am not going to force them out like I might have tried to do last year. 2008 may be a spot more leisurely, but I hope that it's just as interesting.

A pleasant surprise…

Yesterday, when taking the screen grab for my post on Quanta Plus, I did the Alt + Print Screen shuffle as usual. However, when I did so, I was greeted with a dialogue box asking me where I wanted to store the PNG file that was to be produced and what I wanted to call it. The operation was as swish as that. On Windows, the screenshot gets stuffed into the clipboard for you to extricate it with your graphics editor of choice, so this was an interesting surprise. It's the sort of thing that can make a good impression, and it is striking that Linux seems to be ahead of Windows on this one. Who said Linux was less than user-friendly?

Why I’ll be keeping Windows close to hand for a while to come

Even though I have moved to Linux, and it has been fulfilling nearly all of my home computing needs, I do and plan to continue to retain access to Windows courtesy of virtualisation technology. Thought keeping current with the world of the ever pervasive Windows is one motivation, there are others. In fact, now that Windows is more of a sideline, I may even get my hands on Vista at some point to take a further in-depth look at it, hopefully without having to suffer the consequences of my curiosity.

Talking of other reasons for hanging onto Windows, listening to music secured by DRM does come to mind. DRM is seen in a negative light by many in the open-source world, so Linux remains unencumbered by the beast. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, and the whole furore about Vista and DRM earlier this year had me wondering about a Linux future. However, I have been known to buy music from iTunes and would like to continue doing so. Though WINE might be one way to achieve this, retaining Windows seems a sounder option. That way, I am saved from having to convert my protected music files into either Ogg Vorbis or FLAC; the latter involves a lossless compression unlike the former, so the files are bigger with the additional quality that an audiophile would seek. MP3 is another option, yet there are those in the Linux world who frown upon anything patented. That makes getting MP3 support an additional task for those of us wanting it.

In my wisdom, I have succumbed to the delights of expensive web development tools like Altova's XMLSpy and Adobe's Dreamweaver. While I have found a way to get Quanta Plus to edit files on the web server directly and code hacking is my main way to improve my websites, I still will be having a bimble into Dreamweaver from time to time. I have yet to see XMLSpy's grid view replicated in the open-source world, so that should remain a key tool in my arsenal. While I haven't been looking too hard at open-source XML editors recently, there remains unexplored functionality in XMLSpy that I should really explore to see if it could be harnessed.

While I have included implicit references to this already, it needs saying that keeping Windows around also allows you to continue using familiar software. For some, this might be Microsoft Office, but OpenOffice and Evolution have usurped this in my case. Photoshop Elements is a better example for me. Digital transfers from scanners and DSLR's will stay in the world of Linux, while virtualisation allows me to process the images in whatever way I want. For now, I might just stick with the familiar before jumping ship to GIMP at some point in the future. With all that is written on Photoshop, having it there for learning new things seems a very sensible idea.

While open-source software can conceivably address every possible, there are bound to be niches that remain outside its reach. I use mapping software from Anquet when planning hillwalking excursions. It seems very much to be a Windows only offering and I have already downloaded a good amount of mapping, so Windows has to stay if I need to use this and the routes that I have plotted out before now. Another piece of software that finds its way into this bracket is my copy of SAS Learning Edition; there are times when a spot of learning at home goes a long way at work.

So, in summary, my reasons for keeping Windows around are as follows:

• Learning new things about the thing, since I am unlikely to escape its influence in the world of work
• Using iTunes to download new music and to continue to listen to what I have already
• Using and learning about industry standard web development tools like Dreamweaver and XMLSpy
• Easing the transition, by continuing to use Photoshop Elements, for example
• Using niche software like Anquet mapping

Though I suppose that many will relate to the above, Linux still has plenty to take over some of the above. In time, DRM may disappear from the music scene and not before time; accountants and shareholders may need to learn to trust customers. NVu and Quanta Plus could yet usurp Dreamweaver, and there may be an open-source alternative to XMLSpy like there is for so many other areas. The Photoshop versus GIMP choice will continue to prevent itself and all that is written about the former makes it seem silly to throw it away, however good the latter is. Even with changing over Linux equivalents of applications fulfilling standard needs, it still leaves niche applications like hillwalking mapping and that, together with the need to know what Windows might offer in the enterprise space, could be the enduring reasons for keeping it near to hand. That said, I can now go through whole days without firing up a Windows VM, a big change from how it was a few months ago. Still, I suppose that it's all too easy to stick with using one operating system at a time, which is Linux for me these days.

A UNIX shell running on Windows

Here's an idea that I got for a post before I spent that torrid weekend with Windows that caused me to jump ship to Linux. The idea of having a UNIX command line while still remaining on Windows did appeal to me at the time, and Cygwin seems to provide an intriguing way to do this. At its most basic, it is a set of DLL's that allow you to run standard UNIX commands in a shell like what you see below. However, it is extensible with a good number of packages that you can choose to install. NEdit is just one that gets included, and I think that I spied Apache too. The standard installation is a web-based affair, with your downloading only the components that you need; it's worth trawling through the possibilities while you're at it.

Now that I am firmly ensconced in the world of Linux, this may be one possibility that I will park, for a while anyway. After all, I now do have the full power of the UNIX command line...

BBC Radio Player and Linux

It's been a while since I mentioned anything that might be aurally related, and then this rears its head. The Xine plugin beloved by the instance of Firefox on my Ubuntu box simply refuses to play ball with the BBC's Listen Again feature; 6Music shows are what I am trying to catch later. RealPlayer is on the system, but Firefox simply refuses to locate it. On its own, it plays live radio from the BBC and Ireland's Today FM but, unless I need to do some digging, that's not much use for the Listen Again service. It may be some hard-wiring done by Canonical as part of their packaging of Firefox: might be related to their preference for Free Software. If I can be bothered, I might replace it with the usual version to see if RealPlayer can be picked up: I do seem to remember reading somewhere that this was a possibility...

Yes, I could use one of my Windows VM's, but I have found another way courtesy of openSUSE 10.3. No, I haven't changed Linux distro, yet the reason that openSUSE has made a sudden appearance on this blog in recent times has got to do with my acquiring a copy of the latest issue of Linux Magazine. It came emblazoned with a DVD containing both 32-bit and 64-bit variants of openSUSE's latest version and, wanting to have a look at how KDE appears these days, I knocked up a VM and installed the 32-bit variant thereupon.

Unexpectedly, that has afforded a Linux solution to my BBC Radio Player conundrum. openSUSE's Firefox instance can find RealPlayer once you have it installed. That process involves a spot more work than if it was Free Software: you need to add an extra software repository to YaST (openSUSE's configuration utility). The breadcrumb trail is YaST -> Software -> Software Repositories and hitting the Add button fires up a wizard that needs the following settings to set things up as needed:

Protocol: http

Server Name: download.opensuse.org

Directory on server: /distribution/10.3/repo/non-oss/suse/

Authentication: anonymous

Once the new repository was set up (I named it Non-OSS), I found the RPM and YaST took care of the rest. So, what started out as an exercise in curiosity has now found a use. While network traffic may cause playback to stutter, I have what I want without once starting up Windows. Sorting out Ubuntu may happen, but it is a lesser priority and I don't want to disrupt my computing environment in any event.

Choices, choices…

While choice is a great thing, too much of it can be confusing, and the world of Linux is a one very full of decisions. The first of these centres around the distro to use when taking the plunge; you quickly find that there can be quite a lot to it. In fact, it is a little like buying your first SLR/DSLR or your first car: you only really know what you are doing after your first one. Putting it another way, you only know how to get a house built after you have done just that.

With that in mind, it is probably best to play a little on the fringes of the Linux world before committing yourself. It used to be that you had two main choices for your dabbling:

• using a spare PC
• dual booting with Windows by either partitioning a hard drive or dedicating one for your Linux needs.

In these times, innovations such as Live CD distributions and virtualisation technology keep you away from such measures. In fact, I would suggest starting with the former and progressing to the latter for more detailed perusal; it's always easy to wipe and restore virtual machines anyway, so you can evaluate several distros at the same time if you have the hard drive space. It also a great way to decide which desktop environment you like. Otherwise, terms like KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc. might not mean much.

The mention of desktop environments brings me to software choices because they do drive what software is available to you. For instance, the Outlook lookalike that is Evolution is more likely to appear where GNOME is installed than where you have KDE. The opposite applies to the music player Amarok. Nevertheless, you do find certain stalwarts making a regular appearance; Firefox, OpenOffice and the GIMP all fall into this category.

The nice thing about Linux is that distros more often than not contain all the software that you are likely to need. However, that doesn't mean that it is all on the disk and that you have to select what you need during the installation. Though there might have been a time when it might have felt like that, my recent experience has been that a minimum installation is set in place that does all the basics for you to easily add the extras later on an as needed basis. I have also found that online updates are a strong feature too.

Picking up what you need when you need it has major advantages, the big one being that Linux grows with you. You can add items like Apache, PHP and MySQL when you know what they are and why you need them. It's a long way from picking applications of which you know very little at installation time and with the suspicion that any future installation might land you in dependency hell while performing compilation of application source code; the temptation to install everything that you saw was a strong one. The "learn before you use" approach favoured by how things are done nowadays is an excellent one.

Even if life is easier in the Linux camp these days, there is no harm in sketching out your software needs. Any distribution should be able to fulfil most if not all of them. As it happened, the only third party application that I have needed to install on Ubuntu without recourse to Synaptic was VMware Workstation, and that procedure thankfully turned out to be pretty painless.

Ubuntu: an appraisal of hardware support

After a painless start with Ubuntu, I have been able to overcome the obstacles placed in my way thus far. In fact, it is certain to yield a goodly number of blog posts, never a bad thing from my point of view. And so to this instalment...

For this post, I'll stick with the hardware side of things. Compared with previous voyages into the Linux universe, I have not encountered any "brick walls" placed in my path. Though audio support was one bugbear in the past, Ubuntu simply took care of that with no intervention from me. Then, I popped in a CD and music was played back to me, leaving me with the same confidence with MP3 files. In the same way, graphics were set up to my liking with having to lift a finger; while there is a proprietary ATI driver available, I'll stick with the standard set up since it easily works well enough for me. Printer set up needed a prod from my end, but it got on with things and found my HP LaserJet 1018 with nary a bother and all was set up rapidly. All other items of hardware but one scarcely merit a mention, so seamless was their detection and set up.

The one piece of hardware that made me work was my Epson Perfection 4490 Photo scanner. Though it wasn't supported out of the box, a spot of googling was all that it took to find out how to set things to rights. In fact, the best answer turned out to be on Ubuntu's forum, hardly a surprise really. The step-by-step instructions sent me over to Epson's repository of open source Linux drivers for the correct files; I did need to make sure I wasn't selecting 4990 in place of 4490, a straightforward thing to do. I snagged Debian RPM's and used alien to convert them to DEB files. Running dpkg as root did the installation and quick checks with the sane-find-scanner and scanimage commands revealed that all was well, to my clear relief.

Hardware support has always been an Achilles heel for Linux but, based on this experience, the Linux community seem to be more on top of it than ever before. The proprietary nature of the devices is an ever present challenge for driver developers, so getting as far as they have is an impressive achievement. It's a long way from roadblocks due to tempestuous support of modems, sound cards, printers and scanners and I seem to have got over the biggest hurdle on my Linux journey this time around.

A perspective on Linux

Recently, I have revisited an old website that I used to have online in and around 2000 that has since been retired for a while. One thing that it had in common with this blog was its focus on computer technology. While I don’t remember blogging being bandied about as a term back then, a weblog would have fulfilled the site’s much better. One of the sections of this old world website was dedicated to Linux and UNIX; this was where I collected and shared experienced my experiences of these. These days, unless it is held in some cache somewhere (rather unlikely, I think), the only place that it is found is what I bundled together in a tar.gz file for transfer to Linux. Irony strikes…

Back then, my choice of Linux was SuSE 6.2, followed by 6.4 from PC Plus DVD. It was the first, and only, Linux distro that I bought after exploring a selection of distros from cover-mounted CD’s in books and magazines. While I did like it, it wasn’t enough to tempt me away from Windows. I had issues with hardware, and they got in the way of a move. Apart from what some might judge to be clunkiness, there were fewer impediments on the software side.

I am a DIY system builder and there were issues with Linux support of my hardware, particularly my modem. Rather than being in possession of all the electronic wherewithal that a full modem would need, it got the operating system to do some of the work. The trouble was that this locked you into using Windows, hence its Winmodem moniker. Besides this, my Zip drive was vital to me and SuSE didn’t support it out of the box: a kernel recompilation was in order and could involve losing any extensions that SuSE had actually added. Another foible was non-support of a now obsolete UDMA 66 expansion card.

But improvements in hardware support were coming on the scene. Support for printing with CUPS, scanning with SANE and audio with ALSA was coming along nicely and has matured nicely. Apart from cases where vendors refuse to help the Open-Source community and bleeding-edge hardware that needs drivers to recoded according to the demands of GPL, things have come a long, long way.

Software-wise, the only thing holding me from migrating to Linux was my use of Microcal (now OriginLab) Origin, a scientific data visualisation and analysis package that was invaluable for my work. Even then, that could be run using WINE, the Windows API library for Linux. OpenOffice could easily have replaced MS Office for my purposes, unless formula editing was a feature outstanding from the specification. GIMP, once I had ascended the learning curve, would have coped with my graphics processing needs. After committing myself to non-visual web development, Bluefish and Quanta+ would have fulfilled my web development needs. Web technologies such as Perl, PHP, Apache and SQL have always been very much at home on Linux, so no issue there. At that stage, experimenting with these was very much in my future. Surprisingly, web browsing wasn’t that strong in Linux then. Mozilla was still in the alpha/beta development phase and needed many rough ends sorting, while the dreadful Netscape 4 was in full swing with offerings like nautilus coming on stream. Typography support was another area of development at the time, which fed through into how browsers rendered web pages. Downloading and compiling xfstt did resolve the situation.

These days, I have virtual machines set up for Ubuntu, Fedora Core and Mandriva while openSUSE is another option. I spent Saturday night poking around in Fedora (I know, I should have better things to be doing…) and it feels very slick, a world away from where Red Hat was a decade ago. The same applies to Ubuntu, which is leagues ahead of Debian, on which it is based. With both of these, you get applications for updating the packages in the distribution; not something that you might have seen a few years ago. Support for audio and printing comes straight out of the box. I assume that scanner and digital camera support are the same; they need to be. Fedora includes the virtual machine engine that is Xen. I am intrigued by this but running a VM within a VM does seem peculiar. Nevertheless, if that comes off, it might be that Fedora goes onto my spare PC with Windows loaded onto one or more virtual machines. It’s an intriguing idea and having Fedora installed on a real PC might even allow me to see workspaces changed onscreen as if they were the sides of a cube, very nice. Mandriva also offers the same visual treat, but is not a distro that I have been using a lot. The desktop environment may be KDE rather than Gnome as it is in the others, but all the same features are on board. The irony though is that, after starting out my Linux voyage on KDE, I am now more familiar with Gnome these days and, aesthetically speaking, it does look that little better to my eye.

So, would I move to Linux these days? Well, it is supported by a more persuasive case than ever it has been, and I would have to say that it is only logistics and the avoidance of upheaval that is stopping me now. If I were to move to Linux, then it would be by reversing the current situation: going from Linux running in a VM on Windows to Windows running in a VM on Linux. Having Windows around would be good for my personal education and ease the upheaval caused by the migration. Then, it would be a matter of watching what hardware gets installed.