I arrived at my sister’s in LA yesterday. Due to how silly cheap it was to ship it to a US address, I had my new thinkpad x61 shipped to her place. I cracked it open last night. The x61 is one of the smallest, lightest laptops you’ll find these days. In order to achieve those attributes they abandoned an optical drive. Without a DVD drive, how to you ditch vista and install ubuntu?

The answer was alarming painless to pull off. You follow these instructions and create a bootable USB flash drive with the latest version of ubuntu on it. Yes, this is a nerd post so move on or be prepared.

Maybe I’m new to this but this is cool. I now have a 2GB USB drive with a complete live version of ubuntu that can save it’s state. What’s that mean? It means I can plug that into any pc with a USB port and a BIOS that can boot from USB, restart, and I’m up and running in a full instance of linux running on that flash drive.

The one thing I did differently from those instructions is that I didn’t have a cd copy of ubuntu. Instead I simply downloaded the ISO, extracted it locally and copied the files from there.

Why would you ever do that? Well in my case it allowed me to click the install icon and install ubuntu without a DVD drive. Other things? Get in and retrieve data off corrupt OS’s before you blow them away. Allow people to test drive linux on their machines.

Will I ever make use of this? Actually I have no idea. It’s still cool that you can even do it. Maybe something to demo at the next DemoCampGuelph?

When I recently moved back to a *nix environment, I started where I was most familiar. That was Fedora Core since I was previously a Red Hat user. I found it a tad painful and quickly gave ubuntu a test run and I’ve been happily using it for a while now. My original plan, however, was to get onto a bsd variant. I’ve only dabbled with pc-bsd and haven’t had much time for more.

I’m not really in the mood to make another OS change and this article comparing ubuntu to pc-bsd isn’t helping. I have to agree with everything in here from my limited trials, especially the responsiveness. Lately I’m finding my windows image on vmware painfully slow as well.

Crap, time for another change?

I just read Lifehacker’s top 10 ubuntu applications and discovered two lovely applications I hadn’t tried:

• Katapult, similar to Mac’s quicksilver.
• CheckGmail

I agree with their take on Amarok and may give Kopete a try someday but Gaim works fine right now.

I just upgraded to the new version of ubuntu. Not only did I not purchase a DVD, I didn’t even use one. I simply opened the package manager and selected ‘upgrade’. The new release then downloaded itself over the wireless network I’m on, installed itself and rebooted. No glitches, no extra drivers to install, and so far nothing’s stopped working.

To date, that’s the most painless major release OS upgrade I’ve experienced. By a landslide.

PS…The OS seems noticeably more responsive.

I’ve heard of, but had yet to get around to taking beagle for a walk.

“Beagle is a search system for Linux and other modern Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight in Mac OS X, or Google Desktop under Microsoft Windows.”

Wow, you can colour me impressed. That little puppy indexes everything, including my IM conversations and my web browsing history. The mac crowd has spotlight but I certainly haven’t seen anything this slick on windows. Unless of course you’re brave enough to hand over the keys to the boys at google.

The searching and indexing in beagle is built on Lucene. We’re assessing using the .net port on a current project.

Oh man. I finally got around to installing PC-BSD in a VMWare image. For the most part I was hoping I wouldn’t like it. At this point I’m very happy with my setup and don’t need yet another distro I want to dig deeper into. Well that was far from the case.

Brainless install, so far it looks slick and from my limited time playing around it seems very solid and responsive. In the category of cheap eye-candy, it does that bouncy little icon thingy that mac’s do when they’re working. It’s simple but ya I like it.

I haven’t read it all yet but this is cool. An article titled ” The Five Things You Aren’t Allowed to Discuss About Linux“.

I have no clue who this guy is or if he has any idea what he’s talking about. He makes some good points though. Linux shouldn’t be compared to Microsoft. It’s a good point but are people actually comparing Linux to Microsoft? It obviously doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, I agree with his point, whether there’s any point to his point or not….”When we compare an operating system to another we should be comparing the specific distribution, which is a thing”.

I have a similar beef with the Apple ads. Take the video camera one. They make it sound like it’s somehow Microsoft’s fault that your hardware vendor didn’t put a video camera into the laptop you bought. Microsoft, in that context, is not a hardware vendor. Yes I know, he says “I’m a PC” not “I’m windows” but very few people make that distinction. People generally view these ads as mac vs windows…I think?

From slashdot, an incredibly details (10 page) review of one person’s experience of spending 30 days with Ubuntu.

LifeHacker posted a link to a nice little ‘Learning the Command Line‘ article. I get asked a lot to explain my obsession with the command line and why I’d want to seemingly live in the past.

While the sheer power you have is the biggest reason, the next biggest reason is it’s ubiquitousness. I could be using that word completely wrong so I’ll explain. A real example, say I need to search through a large codebase on a project. I’m looking for any mention the word “CreateConnection” in any c# file. As well, I don’t care about any file that has the word “Test” in it’s title as those are unit tests. As well, I only want a list of files. I don’t want specific references in the file, just a list of filenames as I’ll then open up those files and edit by hand. I type one line, and yes I can do type this without referencing 18 books:

find . -name *.cs | xargs grep -l CreateConnection | grep -v “Test”

Let’s not even get started on what else I can easily add to this to write the list to a file, ftp it to a network location, run this as an hourly job to update a network location, and on and on.

So does Visual Studio, or some other gui, allow me to do that? I would guess it would but I don’t care about that. Here’s why. Tomorrow when I’m working on html files while building a website, or xml documents, or txt files, or any non-binary file, I can do the same thing. I’m not bound to finding a new editor or gui that’s implemented this. As well, I can login to almost any server on the net through ssh and do the same thing. That’s powerful.

The same applies to my obsession with vi. Everything I take the time to learn in vi, I know have available to me for any non-binary file on any *nix based machine. Again, in my humble opinion, powerful.

Now I don’t plan on getting my wife or dad in a terminal session but if you use a computer for anything beyond checking email and browsing the interweb then do yourself a favour and try the command line. You will be useless at first but didn’t your parent’s tell you, if it was easy everyone would be doing it.

An old post of Steve’s about related to OS X users jumping to Ubuntu. Steve pretty much sums up why I have no current plans to become a mac user…

“The reason that Mark and Cory are moving to Ubuntu is that they are uncomfortable with Apple’s use of closed-source, proprietary formats. Cory in particular seems to have a real problem with corporate invasiveness, closed formats, and DRM.

The Mac has never pretended to be anything other than closed and proprietary. Lots of people like to say that the Mac would be the dominant platform today if they had only licensed the Mac OS. Lots and lots of people really wish they could knock together a box of parts and run OS X. This isn’t even touching on the fact that Apple software isn’t open source. The Apple box is, more or less, a closed loop. You’re in or you’re out.”

Ok I really didn’t mean to just swipe Steve’s entire post but he does such a great job summing it up…

“Finally, people switching away from OS X is a good thing, more or less. Sure, Mac users Apple to gain as much market share as possible but ultimately, people switching away is an indication that the OS competition isn’t just between Apple and Microsoft. If Vista kicks ass and Mac users start bleeding over to Ubuntu or another flavour of Linux, you better believe that OS X will become better than it is. It may even become a more open system if the Apple marketing wonks figure that that’s the best way to keep users.

Please relax folks. The canaries aren’t dead on the bottom of the cage, they’ve just flown the coop.”