Linux and the Desktop

Often as I read my Internet news I note that the perennial question of "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" and I started thinking about it. I've also recently been playing with Windows 8 and I said to my co-worker "Is Windows 8 ready for the desktop?" We both laughed. As an outgrowth of this I started to really look at what it would take for me as a consultant with a range of small and medium business clients to move them to Linux. 

Obviously there are a range of applications that are not cross platform - usually either financial (MYOB etc) or industry specific stuff.Wine could potentially take care of this, or even running Windows in a virtual machine - which is common with people needing Windows XP to run specific software and being unable to run it on Windows 7 (and also 8). As for the common applications like word processing, spreadsheets and presentations there are a range of Open Source versions like NeoOffice, or even Google Apps or Office 365.

If you consider application support beyond the specific software noted above, there are plenty of applications available in your Linux of choice for all the stuff you want to do - video / audio / image editing, video / audio play etc. The options are numerous.

Taking into account Linux's robust architecture and resilience against viruses, trojans and malware, then the operating system starts to really look good. It's not uncommon for me to have a Linux desktop with 30 plus days of up time. Updates are easy and encompass the OS as well as apps, all in one reasonably easy to use package (I like Linux Mint personally and it's great for all these things). 

Take Android for example. Prior to it gaining popularity I bet there were a lot of people asking if Android was ready for the mobile market place. Time has certainly shown that it is. The difference between the mobile phone marketplace and the desktop is simply that the competition is so much more fierce. Microsoft's  stranglehold over the desktop, strengthened by their bundled browser Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player and buy in from all the big software firms. 

Chromebooks - Linux on the desktop! Obviously it's ready - it needs the brilliant packaging and design of MacOS X. And probably someone big to push it. Dell have been offering it for some time now and the excellent Ubuntu Windows installer (also available on Mint) gives the new user a chance to play with it. 

Give Linux a try - if only in a virtual machine and make up your own mind:

http://www.ubuntu.com

http://www.linuxmint.com

http://www.redhat.com

http://www.apple.com

Munin for Monitoring

Lately I've been very busy with work, but I find that I still need to keep an eye on the Linux servers I have kicking around at home and at the office. I use Nagios for basic monitoring (ping, smtp, http) but wanted something a bit more fine grained on the actual host itself. I stumbled on munin when doing some Google searching.

Munin's homepage is here: http://munin-monitoring.org and I'm running it on a variety of servers at them moment (mostly Ubuntu and Debian). It supports quite a few distributions and operating systems so check it out if you're interested in seeing what's happening on your servers.

I like the many graphs that it produces to demonstrate what's happening and I also fell into the trap of trying to over-configure things. There are only a couple of basic things to change to suit yourself, restart apache2 and munin-node and it's slamming. It also monitors multiple machines - install munin-node instead of munin and munin-node and configure as recommended. I thought I'd be tricky with it and things didn't go as planned so it appeared that it wasn't working. I was over thinking it though and it did work, very well actually, once I found the spot it was creating the files in :-)

A handy app and a nice way to keep on top of your servers!

Review: Linux Mint

I have long been an advocate of Debian GNU/Linux (hereafter referred to as Linux). It's wonderful for servers, stable, with a predictable development cycle. The Ubuntu distribution builds on this with a lovely desktop and wonderful, easy hardware and software management. Mint builds on this again with a polished distribution that I'm finding quite enjoyable to use. You can find Mint here at: www.linuxmint.com It's a regular 700MB download iso and uses Ubuntu repositories. As usual, you have the options of using the included software manager (which is good) or aptitude or apt (my preference).

The machine I'm using for this is a HP/Compaq Presario C300. It's an older laptop, with a Celeron M processor and I've bumped the RAM up to a gig which gives me plenty to play with, even given that the video card steals some RAM. The C300 also has a lovely wide screen with that glossy look I normally despise but find to be very eyeball friendly at the moment. It only has a 60GB hard disk which is completely adequate for my needs. On to the review of Mint...

Given that this distribution is built on Ubuntu there are many lovely features that are underlying it. All the hardware in the notebook was picked up very swiftly and easily. It all worked out of the box. As a little back story - I was running Ubuntu on this notebook but the wireless wouldn't connect to my hidden wireless network. Frustrated because there seemed no answer to this problem, I found via Google a forum note that Mint worked correctly. The developers have apparently fixed this up. So I installed it and enabled things like the encrypted home directory (just to play with). The performance of the device is not noticeably affected by the decryption/encryption of files in my home directory which is nice. Access to all controls is through the Control Centre and I've had no problems with it at all. Automatically detecting devices works beautifully - Mint found and configured my HP2100 laser printer quickly and very easily. This is the kind of thing I love about the new Linux distributions. Long ago I remember writing the lp files to get printers recognised and working. Not much fun at all - but very stable!

Stability is always an issue for me. Being a computer professional, the last thing I want to do is come home and have to fix my own PCs - what a nightmare that always is. Especially given I have a *very* non-standard network doing all kinds of weird things and the last thing I want to do is try to work out whether it's my PC or my network causing things to be unhappy. Mint is wonderfully stable. I've had it running as my day to day work machine, in and out of suspend and hibernate and it's been terrific. It's worked reliably and quickly even with the in and out of suspend/hibernate. I have had problems with this in the past with other Linux distributions but Mint kicked butt. As a work box that needs to do all kinds of weird things and do them reliably, Mint does the job admirably.

On a superficial level, I like the green theme and the backgrounds etc are all very good. I really don't like the browns of Ubuntu and usually the first thing I do is to change the themes and backgrounds. I know I know - very shallow but... I'm still using the default Mint theme. It's nice and it's easy on the eyes. I'd recommend this distribution for the novice user all the way through to the systems admin type person. I don't know that it would suit the hardcore hacker (not being one) but I'm sure someone of that ilk would get by :-) You also have the option of the LTS 5 year supported version the same as Ubuntu. It's a nice little option to have. Otherwise you get the same release cycle as Ubuntu.

In conclusion Mint is definitely worth a look and it's heritage of stability, great software and hardware configuration, and ease of use make it a terrific distribution.

Adventures with eeePC: Enter EasyPeasy

Recently I attempted to enable the Advanced Desktop on my eeePC. I'm not *exactly* sure what I broke, but I broke my little netbook good. Damn. I could get it to boot but had no desktop. No icons, no information nothing. Very, very disappointing. So I thought that perhaps it was an opportunity to have a look at a few other things. Hunting for a new netbook operating system found me looking mostly at Linux offerings, with some websites advocating Windows 7. Eventually I found my way to Easy Peasy (http://www.geteasypeasy.com/) which uses Ubuntu 8.04 as its base and builds upon that with a myriad of customisations and clever manipulations of the system. I love Ubunutu - it's basis in Debian means it's rock solid with tonnes of terrific applications. The installation was a bit nervy - I didn't want to brick my netbook. The website has an excellent walk through and after a few USB memory key issues I finally got things going in the right direction.

The interface is great. Speed is great. I still have a grip about Mozilla Firefox though. It seems to pause (and hold up everything else) every now and then. It disrupts my flow and annoys me. With the recent release of Easy Peasy 1.5 I hope that will be fixed. I'm downloading it now so I'll find out very soon I hope. Generally it was been excellent though. All the devices worked perfectly and although I've had a few problems with a bluetooth mouse I've got, it's been fine otherwise. The particular mouse in question is *very* sensitive to the devices it connects to. The addition of the 8GB SD card has made storage a non issue and I have a 160GB external disk with a heap of stuff on it if I require the extra disk space.

I'm installing the updated version now - it's based on Ubuntu 9.04 so I'll post another note about it when it's completed. Let's hope it goes well!

Review: Sun VirtualBox

Recently I've had to find a virtual machine emulator. Given my limited budget (read: zero) I was hunting around for various different pieces of software. Microsoft have their virtual machine software: Virtual PC which is a polished bit of software. It is, however, not up to par with what I want to do. Because I run a host Windows machine and want to use Linux as a guest operating system, VirtualPC has all sorts of issues with it. I tried it and didn't like it. I stumbled upon VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org) which appears to be sponsored by Sun. Given Sun's previous support of Open Source, I decided to try it.

The installation is very simple and straightforward - it installs extra network adapters, DHCP servers for the internal NAT'd network and a few other bits and pieces. The guest OS support it offers is excellent. In a *very* short amount of time I had a copy of Debian running from the netboot cd, installed and configured an FTP server and I was very happy. My host operating system was Windows Server 2008, which isn't 100% supported but does the job very nicely anyway. I've run it under Windows XP too and it works very well (especially on my Dell D610 Latitude with a 1.6GHz Centrino processor and 2GB of RAM). I'm going to test OpenSolaris on it and see how it goes under the installation.

Some years ago I ran VMWare Desktop to have many virtual machines for testing and other purposes and I found it to be rock solid. The VMWare gear is very good. I have found, to my considerable pleasure, that VirtualBox is as solid and feature filled as VMWare was. It's free status is even better and I love the fact that it supports Linux so beautifully. I'll be experimenting with various other guest OSs in the next few days and I'll let you know my progress as I play with it.