Lines are Blurring

10 July 2007

I still work on a Windows laptop for my day job (but thankfully also on a Red Hat Linux server), and I’m using VNC to remotely run Microsoft Money and a couple of Excel spreadsheets on a laptop at home, but other than that I’ve been all in Ubuntu at home (well, a little bit of Fedora also). Still loving the learning process and still so much to do. Every direction I turn there’s something new I want to figure out and I go down all kinds of side alleys in addition to the normal time I burn in my feeds.

It feels comfortable and it feels like home, with a few minor exceptions of things I want to do and haven’t figured out how to do yet.

I just read a humorous rant from Penguin Pete about a Windows grep program where a commenter pointed out that Windows has a built-in grep called “findstr.” Without thinking, I switched over to a window to type in findstr and see if it was actually available, before realizing that I’m not in Windows and it was a Unix terminal window I clicked on instead of a Windows command prompt. And since the laptop is asleep right now, I don’t really feel like waking it up to try it out.

And I don’t really care that much what’s on Windows. Curiosity may prompt me to try it tomorrow at work if I think about it, but why bother here when I have the real grep and all the powerful building blocks of the Unix command line to play with. (Even if I’m like my 17-month-old daughter and only vaguely aware of the possibilities of my blocks at the moment.)

This post isn’t to say that Windows and GNU/Linux are that much alike, but just to say that I’m starting to feel as comfortable and at home in Ubuntu as I do in Windows, and it hasn’t taken all that long despite my past struggles.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 10 July 2007 at 10:12 pm
filed under moving

bookmark with del.icio.us

Comments

I don’t know if whatever machine it is you’re running Ubuntu on is new enough to support virtualization extensions on its CPU, but have you considered installing a virtual-machine copy of Windows to do the things you’re doing over VNC right now? I suppose it might feel like a step backward, having gotten off Windows only to be installing a full copy of it right back on the harddrive (albeit contained in a file on a Linux-managed filesystem), but if you’re doing it just to run a few programs and by installing it you’re replacing the functionality of a second windows-dedicated computer, I’d still call that a step forward in your quest to switch over completely.

VirtualBox would probably be the easiest to setup through its wizards and GUI (and a GPL version is available), but personally I’d be tempted to try out a kvm-backed copy of qemu, since that’s the new cool way to do this sort of thing; also, kvm might be fairly new, but stuff that is part of the mainline kernel does tend to advance rather quickly, especially when it has as much public and corporate interest as virtualization, so even compared to 5-year old products from commercial companies like VMWare, I’d say kvm is a pretty good bet in the long run. I don’t know how available the parts are yet in Ubuntu, though (you’d need a kernel module and a special version of qemu, I think).

Anyway, I’m writing this as I install Ubuntu on my freshly-wiped laptop (a 1.5-year-old Compaq), after I realized that the ubuntu partition was actually able to control enough of the hardware in the laptop, even the weird TI card reader, and that what windows really did was run Firefox, Visual Studio, and a putty terminal to a coLinux “Virtual Machine,” which I was always wishing was my main shell anyway. There are a few other incidental programs I use as well, but like Firefox they’re all open-source and cross-platform so I can keep using the exact same software. I suspect I’m going to miss Visual Studio since nothing else I’ve tried is quite so nice at editing C++ (and the laptop’s CPU is an AMD Sempron 2800, so no running Visual Studio through kvm for me), but being able to use vim and switch back and forth to a real command line will probably be enough to make me forget all about Visual Studio, and if it isn’t and I really miss having autocomplete, Eclipse’s CDT is quite nice. I might also miss the way the mute button lights up when the volume is muted, but that’s a pretty minor thing; also, it worked on Ubuntu 6.04, so it should be possible to figure out how to get it working again if it really bugs me.

Of course, not wanting to make my first full-time (albeit on one of my computers only, so I guess it really only works out to being a 1/3rd) switch to desktop Linux too easy, I’m attempting to install ubuntu to a LUKS-encrypted root, but since asking for your passphrase and mounting a LUKS partition is apparently handled practically automatically by Ubuntu’s initramfs, I’m also going to try to get it to instead use keys off of a USB Flash Drive. And I’m using Gutsy Tribe 3, because it can’t be that unstable, can it, and even if it is, I only need to suffer with the instability for 2-3 months until final release, right?

So after finding your site while searching for information on how you go about encrypting filesystems on Linux (I’ve decided to use LUKS, but EncFS looks useful for directories I want to be able to backup to an untrusted server or synchronize between different machines), I’m now reading your other entries while waiting for it to install, and am mainly filling up your comment box to waste time. Sorry :)

Ah, looks like it’s done copying files and now I need to figure out how to make sure the filesystem will actually get mounted once I reboot. To anybody else doing the same thing, FeistyEncryptedRootWithInstaller on the ubuntu help pages is pretty useful, and unlike other howtos on the Ubuntu site, realizes you don’t need to install a temporary copy of the OS when you’ve already got a LiveCD copy running (which is to say: apt-get works when running off the LiveCD — you don’t need to install a copy of the OS just because the LiveCD is missing a program you need).

Posted by Nick on 27 July 2007 at 3:01 pm

Thanks for this and your other comment, Nick — my comment box has been pretty empty lately so I appreciate the company. :-)

I’ve considered trying to set up some kind of virtualization scheme to run Windows but have held off because of the combination of lack of time to experiment and the hope that I’d finally get the last couple of pieces moved. But I’ll keep your suggestion in mind if I decide to go that route.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 27 July 2007 at 4:28 pm

VirtualBox is awesome. Very nicely done. Easy to install and use in Ubuntu.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 6 October 2007 at 8:40 am

You can follow any responses to this entry through the
comments feed.