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Now that the Vista to Ubuntu switch is complete and I have had some time to use Ubuntu in a productive environment... I can say that I love Ubunutu (I have had experience with Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, QNX and Debian in the past)! Even running Windows XP under VMware is great. I was doing some Photoshop editing under VMware on some large files and it seemed faster than when I was running Photoshop natively on Vista.
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Everything was not all smooth sailing, especially when it came to setting up my two monitors, both on Ubuntu and on VMware. But after setting that up, everything else was easy. I would definitely recommend installing Ubuntu on family computers, especially since my ordeal this past weekend with a family members Windows XP machine that was so infected I just wanted to throw it out the Window...
For convenience the entire series is posted below. I will continue to add blog posts to the Ubuntu category as a continue to use Ubuntu in the day to day. There will also be a series shortly where I ditch Vista on my laptop for Ubuntu. Enjoy.
Ubuntu: The Switch
This series of blog entries will document the process of a ThemBid.com developers journey from the vast barren lands of Windows Vista to the green pastures of Ubuntu.
Motivations
- All throughout my University life and education, Linux was my home. I was raised on Red Hat, Mandriva and Gentoo (my favorite). It is time to return home.
- For my Life 2.0 project, I require a low cost point of entry and I have decided to use Ubuntu as the OS. Although the system will be OS independent, I want to make sure that those withe most restrictive of budgets can be equally as productive as their Windows brethren.
- I have a long term vision of creating a Small/Micro Business distrubution of Linux, and this is the very first baby step.
- I have been running Ubuntu in a VMware instance within Windows; however, I have not been happy with the performance that Vista gives me (random crashes and slow responsiveness), even after performing some optimizations and with upgraded hardware.
- I have two other machines that are running Windows Vista, so I will be able to transfer, compare and fall back as needed.
- It will be fun.
Current Hardware Setup
- OS: Windows Vista Ultimate
- MODEL: Dell Precision Workstation 690
- CPU: DualCore Intel Xeon 5050, 3000MHz
- RAM: 2048 MB DDR-677 Fully Buffered ECC DDR2 SDRAM
- MONITORS: 2 DELL 19″ LCD’s
- VIDEO CARD: Radeon X700 Pro 256MB
- AUDIO: SigmaTel STAC9200
- HD: 232GB SCSI Internal Drive, 298 GB External USB Drive, 74GB External USB Drive
- OPTICAL: CDRW / DVD
- PRINTER/SCANNER: HP Officejet 5600 (printer, fax, scanner), Samsung ML-1740
- WEBCAM: Creative WebCam NX Pro
- MIC/HEADPHONES/SPEAKER: Logitech USB Headset/Mic, Logitech Computer Speakers
Frequently Used Software
- Firefox 2, IE 7, IE 6
- PHP Eclipse
- Skype
- MS Outlook
- MS Office
- QuickBooks Premier 2007
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Notepad++
- RoboForm / RoboForm Portable / Goodsync
- Adobe Acrobat / Distiller
- WS FTP
- WinSCP3
- UltraMon
- GoToMeeting
- FreeMind
- Audacity
- Camtasia Studio 4
- XAMPP
- ActiveSync
- Google Desktop
- Tortoise SVN
- Macromedia Flash
- iTunes
- Windows Media Player
Goals
- Ultimately I would like to have a Windows Vista, OS X and Ubuntu setup, with each optimized for productivity. I will document the OS X experience as well.
First Steps
- Back up all data and settings
- Find the Linux equivalents of my frequently used software.
- For those that can not be replaced, I will use Wine, Crossover Office and VMware in that order. Or I may just run those applications on a separate Windows machine.
- Install a fresh copy of Ubuntu and begin the fun.
Back Up all Data and Settings
I will be formatting the hard drive so I will need to make sure that all the data I have on the machine is safely backed up. Fortunately about six months ago I started the practice of storing no files on a local computer. Everything is stored either on the web, on servers or external hard drives. I just needed to make sure there were no changes in my local SVN folder that needed to be committed and I synchronized my RoboForm data.
Replacement Software
- Firefox 2, IE 7, IE 6
- Firefox 2, IE6&7 emulated
- PHP Eclipse
- Skype
- MS Outlook
- MS Office
- QuickBooks Premier 2007
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Notepad++
- RoboForm / RoboForm Portable / Goodsync
- Adobe Acrobat / Distiller
- Linux version of the reader
- PDF Creator and Ghostscript
- WS FTP
- WinSCP3
- UltraMon
- I will see how my two monitor setup works natively in Linux
- GoToMeeting
- FreeMind
- Audacity
- Camtasia Studio 4
- XAMPP
- ActiveSync
- Google Desktop
- Tortoise SVN
- Macromedia Flash
- iTunes
- Windows Media Player
- Remote Desktop
- Timer
The Installation
I start at 5:48pm (and 7 seconds)
- In goes the fresh new Ubuntu CD (I am inside Vista at this point). I am using version 7.4 Desktop Edition.
- I write down the current IP adress I have assigned to this machine before rebooting (almost forgot about that).
- I note the peripherals that I have currently attached via USB (I forgot to do this last time)
- Two External Drives
- Pocket PC (will remove for now)
- Webcam (will remove for now)
- iPod (will remove for now)
- HP OfficeJet (will remove for now)
- So I now only have the one external drive connected.
- I hit F12 to go into the boot menu.
- I choose Start or Install Ubuntu.
- The orange bar going back and forth reminds me of Kit.
- And then there is some Zen like sound….
- The desktop has now loaded and I go ahead and click on the Install icon.
- I choose my time zone, keyboard layout.
- At the “Prepare disk space” section I choose “Guided - use entire disk”.
- At the “Migrate Documents and Settings” screen it does not find any users or operating systems suitable for importing form. I find this odd, maybe Vista is not supported yet.
- Ubuntu asks “Who are you?”. I reply that it is none of their business.
- I am notified that Ubuntu is “Ready to install” (thanks to justnik, lol). I note there is an Advanced button and since I consider myself Advanced I click it. Then I click OK and smile.
- I click Install and watch in wonder as Ubuntu does its install magic.
- I click Restart Now and remove the CD.
- I watch in awe as as my computer loads up Ubuntu…
- I log in! More Zen like music…
- I see a notification that informs me that software updates are available. There are 60 total! I go ahead and install them.
- After successful update I am asked to do a system restart.
- I do the berries and cream dance… (replace Starburst with Ubuntu)
The whole process took 1 hour 8 minutes and 14 seconds.
Monitor
I have a two monitor setup with a Radeon X700 Pro 256MB. Out of the box my monitors are simply duplicating each other and the resolution will not go over 1024×768 and the optimum resolution for the monitors is 1280 x 1024. I found the tutorial I needed here, but then I tried this:
- System->Administration->Restricted Drivers Manager
- I went through the simple wizard and did a computer restart
- After rebooting I opened up the terminal and typed “sudo aticonfig –desktop-setup=horizontal” to make the screen spread across two monitors.
- Then I rebooted again.
- Joy! I now have the second monitor extending the first.
- Now I tried enabling video accelleration with “sudo aticonfig –overlay-type=Xv” typed into the terminal, and then rebooted.
- To fix the resolution:
- sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- under the SubSection “Display” where the depth is 24 I added a mode “1280×1024″
- My second monitor was fuzzy, but a hardware auto-adjust fixed it right up.
Applications
Next stop the applications tab. Let’s see what I should remove…. I select show “Installed Applications” and I ended up removing nothing Seems like a nice bare bones install.
Places
Ubuntu found my external drives nicely and when I browsed the network I saw the shared drive from the HP. When I right clicked and selected “Make Link” I received an error “Unsupported operation” (I think this is because I am not logged in as root). So I right clicked the desktop and chose “Create Launcher”, for type I chose file then for location I typed smb://[name of HP computer]/[name of shared folder].
System Preferences
I tweak the following:
- About Me
- I add in details that are not secret. I’m assuming this data may be used to help automate filling other stuff out later..
- Sessions
- I removed the Evolution alarm manager, since I use Gmail for my email.
- Screensaver
- Just had to enable the Matrix screensaver.
- There are so many cool ones, I would like to use a random option.
- Theme
- Switched to the “Glossy” theme.
- Desktop Background
System Administration
- Printing
- Used the wizard to connect to a printer connected to my other computer. The wizard made it trivial.
- Services Settings
- Disabled the Bluetooth device management since this computer has not Bluetooth devices.
- Shared Folders
- I am informed that sharing services are not installed, but a friendly wizard appears to make that process easy.
- I change my domain/workgroup to match the one I had setup in Windows.
- I share the two external drives and test that I can access from my other Windows computer (no luck).
- I restart the Ubuntu machine and all is well.
- I set up a the samba user by doing the following:
- sudo smbpasswd -a [username]
Application Migration
Now that Ubuntu is up and running and configured the way I like, its time to get the applications installed. Following is a list of all the applications that I replaced from my Windows environment with notes on how to get them installed and configured properly. I have put command line commands into quotes.
- First I setup a root password by using “sudo passwd”
- VMware
- There are some applications that just wont run in Ubuntu and I do not want to mess around with Wine at this point. Eventually I would like to get to a stage where all my needs can be served by Ubuntu + Wine, but for now I will use the free VMware virtual machine to emulate Windows XP.
- I used this tutorial to get it working.
- I gave it 80GB of hard drive space and 1024MB of RAM and installed Windows XP Professional (Vista is still experimental with VMware and XP can do all I that need Windows to do for me).
- One thing I have not figured out yet is how to get full screen working with two monitors. Currently when I do this the monitor is only cloned.
- IE6
- I tried to first install Muliple IE in my virtualized Windows machine, but IE6 kept crashing.
- I then decided to install IE6 in Ubuntu using this tutorial. That did not work correctly either; some of the images would not show up.
- So then I created another partition in VMware that will be strictly used for IE6 testing. I gave it 8GB with 256 RAM with 1 processor.
- NTFS
- I found out that I could not write to my external drives because they were ntfs file systems. I used this thread to get started.
- So then I “sudo apt-get install ntfs-config”
- “ntfs-config”
- I checked Enable write support for external device
- PHP Eclipse
- I used the tutorial here.
- Skype
- I installed the Linux version from the website with the Debain 7.04 download package installer.
- Outlook 2003
- For now I installed Outlook 2003 on my VM (the one with 80GB). I use this to synchronize with my 1and1.com exchange account which I use mainly because of the great synchronization with my Pocket PC.
- I have Evolution already installed by Ubuntu which I will attempt to get it to work with Exchange and my Pocket PC at a later date.
- MS Office
- I will be using Open Office which is already included in the Ubuntu installation. I do have Office 2003 installed on VMware as well.
- QuickBooks Premier 2007
- I will install this in the VM.
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
- I will install this in the VM.
- I also have the Gimp bundled with Ubuntu, but I think for a time I will still use Photoshop since I am experienced and skilled with it.
- Notepad
- I will be using the awesome VI!
- RoboForm / RoboForm Portable / Goodsync (To syncronize the desktop version of roboform with my thumb drive)
- I’m not sure how to replace this yet. For now I’m using Firefox’s built in password manager. Has anyone found a Linux equivalent solution?
- Adobe Acrobat / Distiller
- The document viewer that comes with Ubuntu seems to work just fine for viewing PDF’s and it loads very fast.
- For printing PDF’s, I used the tutorial here. PDF printing is already supported in Open Office.
- WS FTP
- “sudo apt-get install gftp”
- UltraMon
- See the post on Unbuntu configuration on how I was able to get my two monitor setup to work. The new version of Ubuntu will have a better GUI support for dual monitor configuration.
- GoToMeeting
- I will play with webhuddle and see if it will be a suitable replacement. If it works well, I’ll just need to find another conference calling solution.
- I’ll have to run GoToMeeting in VMware for now.
- FreeMind
- Audacity
- “sudo apt-get install audacity”
- Camtasia Studio 4
- There is a good tutorial here.
- I installed xvidcap by downloading the .deb package from sourceforge and using the package installer.
- XAMPP
- I will use XAMPP to maintain consistency with my Windows development environment.
- I downloaded and followed the instructions on the XAMPP website. Make sure to use sudo.
- I also ran “sudo /opt/lampp/lampp security” to add better security.
- ActiveSync
- I found what I needed here. Luckily my xv6700 device is supported. I’ll play around with this more when I start migrating from Outlook to Evolution.
- Google Desktop
- grep and find!
- sed and awk!
- Tortoise SVN
- “sudo apt-get install subversion”
- I will just use the command line version and I will look into integrating svn with eclipse.
- Macromedia Flash
- I downloaded the player from Adobe’s website.
- I installed Macromedia Flash in VMware.
- iTunes
- I installed Amarok, but I will using my iPod with the HP media center because of the awesome sounds…
- “sudo apt-get install amarok”
- Windows Media Player
- Remote Desktop
- I installed a ssh server instead using this guide.
- I already have a dynamic IP account. I just need to forward port 22 to the Ubuntu machine on my router settings.
- Timer / Alarm
- I think I will use Evolution for the alarms. Does anyone have a suggest for an alarm clock that allows for multiple alarms and multiple timers?
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