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Being a gadget freak and a Web freak, I tend to keep a close eye on emerging gadgets that either fit in your pocket, surf the web with, or conveniently both.

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Sunday, June 08, 2008

Ubuntu after a month

I've been using Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 as the operating system on my main home laptop for over a month now. Windows XP having decided that it didn't want to play nicely anymore. I had a few little issues at the start, but I'm starting to make progress.

The Firefox problems

I missed my del.icio.us toolbar and, praise Murphy, days after I complained, a Firefox 3 version of the Del.icio.us toolbar was released, and I'm satisfied again. (Thanks for the tip, MarkusT.)

There's one quirky issue with the del.icio.us dialogue, the Save button disappears off the screen. I think this is happening because I have a load of network contacts which pushes the Save button outside the view area.

I figured out the random effects of right clicking links in Firefox. I was seeing odd behaviour like right clicking a link either opening an 'Add bookmarks' dialog, or open Firebug's Inspect element, or open a new window. It's a timing issue.

There's a noticeable delay in the context menu appearing, and by the time it appears the mouse-button is already released, and the default option highlighted depends on where the context menu appears. Since the mouse-button has been released, it takes the highlighted option. Unfortunately, since the initial highlighted option differs depending on how the context menu is rendered, that's the basis of the seemingly random behaviour of right clicking a link.

The simple solution is to hold down the right mouse-button until the context menu appears, and then select the desired option, and then release the mouse button.

Twitter

I was experiencing performance problems with Twitter's web interface, so I decided to co-opt a Twitter client. One of the options from the Ubuntu Application Installer is Twitux. I've been running that for the last six weeks and I'm fairly pleased with that.

Except that I'd prefer my direct messages to be much more intuitively reachable that choosing between direct messages or friend tweets. I want both, preferably in a tab pane.

Knowledge gathering

I used to use Dave Winer's OPML Editor to keep track of ideas and notes, and I've struggled to find an adequate replacement. None of the hierarchical editors available on Linux offered anything close to the editing fluency of the OPML editor. I tried NoteCase, briefly touched on Vim Outliner and the console-only hnb.

I found an application that works for me, and it surprised me. I tried Tomboy and I've been hooked on it ever since. So hooked that I'm looking forward to seeing a Windows version appearing so I can use it in work.

Tomboy is a fantastic piece of software, it goes well beyond a Sticky note application, and when using lists it decently mimics outlining. Tomboy is like a desktop wiki, but far far better than the Windows alternatives I tried out over 18 months ago.

The key features of Tomboy are:

Tomboy is, for me, a killer application on Ubuntu, an application that is better than anything on Windows. It just works, and it's a very nice user experience.

Chess

The key friction point of migrating from Windows was the loss of Chessbase tools. I've tried to use scid as a replacement, and although I'm finding some really nice features - like novelty search, tournament search, opening repertoire reviews; I'm suffering a little under the analysis modules. Although Crafty is a perfectly adequate chess engine, and there are others available, scid doesn't present the analysis as well as Shredder.

It's not that scid is unusable, it's that I have to change my expectations and just get over the fact that there's hardly any chess software on the market that is as usable and as user-friendly and as intuitive as Chessbase products.

I've been investigating on running Shredder on Ubuntu using Wine. I'm thinking about trying it. The suggested path is to install Shredder to a USB stick on a Windows machine, and then plug that USB stick into my Ubuntu machine.

To be fair, I've been using scid to review and blog about the Corus/Wijk aan Zee tournament. It's a heavy tournament of seven grandmaster games a day, the majority of games are hard-fought. It's the worst case scenario, but I did get through the analysis, it just wasn't as comfortable as I wanted.

I guess one of the downsides of scid is that its an older version that comes with Ubuntu's massive software library. Perhaps if I try to hand-install a more recent version, or ChessDB, then I can get over the perceived hardship I'm facing.

So I have options, which means I'm not in a dead end yet. Scid is adequate and interesting, just not as high quality as the Fritz chess interface.

Plug and play

I'm blown away by Ubuntu's seamless support of USB devices. My MP3 player which I use for listening to podcasts, needs a special driver in Windows XP. It just appears as a file system on my desktop, I just copy and delete files over to it as if it were just another directory.

Although, one little gotcha is that when you delete files from a USB stick, they don't get deleted immediately, so you don't see an immediate increase in space on the drive. The files are in a Deleted Items Folder, and once that is emptied, then the space becomes available for more data.

I used my digital camera (Nikon Coolpix 4600) yesterday taking loads of pictures at the Biggin Hill Air Show. I just plugged it into my laptop, and again, I had a simple directory structure so I could access all my pictures.

My various harddrive enclosures and USB sticks have all just worked after plugging it in. Only one failed, and I think that's because the drive itself is flaky, not a problem with Ubuntu itself.

Uploading to Flickr

The Flickr Desktop Organizer frustrated me quite a lot yesterday evening. It decided to synchronise with my current photos on Flickr, downloading my 1600+ images plus 30+ photo sets. Three hours later, it then crashed every time I tried to upload my new 120+ photos taken yesterday. Here is the first application I actually uninstalled in Ubuntu.

I took a step back and installed the Flickr Uploader which used the normal GNOME interface. This just worked, and allowed me to tag, title and describe loads of photos either all-at-once, in groups and individually. The upload took ages, but it was 84Mb, so that ran over night. And now I have my Biggin Hill pictures up on Flickr.

The F-Spot photo manager is a neat tool for viewing pictures. It's fullscreen mode is perfect for my simplistic needs.

Developing

I had a few issues with the graphical MySQL clients, but have now settled on the MySQL Query Browser which is similar to SQLYog.

Bluefish has become my main editing home, whether it's writing blogposts, JavaScript and PHP. It's good enough basis for text editing and my impression will probably improve as I understand more and more of the features the editor has to offer. I haven't found a way of running a PHP script I'm writing and pipe it's output to a tabbed window. Terminal is sufficient for the moment, since I can then take advantage of the shell to do better things.

Next steps

I want to figure out how to get Bluetooth working so I can transfer photos from my mobile phone (a Nokia 6233) up to Flickr. On this particular laptop I have a bluetooth USB device. It might just be as simple as plugging the USB widget in and get another file system view.

I need to experiment with chess software a bit more and find a more comfortable set of tools. The main difficulty is the lack of support of the new Chessbase cbh format (not the older cbf format) outside of chess tools. If I get Shredder running in Wine, this problem disappears. At the moment, I need a Windows machine to access the chess data I need, I can't entirely rely on one Ubuntu laptop yet.

Since I've found a one-to-one match with most Windows software and functionality, I'm in a position to consider what Ubuntu offers that's not available elsewhere. Tomboy is a fantastic example of the possibilities, and I'm looking forward to making better use of the Ubuntu desktop.

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Make or break with Ubuntu

I've reformatted my main home laptop (Thinkpad R31) from Windows XP to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The XP install is borked to the point I can no longer use it. I thought I'd try out a recent version of Ubuntu and see if I can make the transition, and if that proves too much, I can always reformat the laptop with a brand new installation of Windows XP.

Why Ubuntu? The main reason is that Sam Ruby is using it on his company Thinkpad, and still keeps getting great stuff done. The fact that its funded by South African billionaire and all-round good-guy, Mark Shuttleworth is notable, but it's the general usability and what seems like brilliant community support from Ubuntu forums that are far better reasons.

Dieing breath of XP

My main home laptop running XP became too much of a hassle to use any more. Weekly reboots became daily reboots became thrice daily reboots. Then Firefox stopped loading and URLs with query strings. Quickly opening Internet Explorer, noticing how infested that browser was, and noticing it too couldn't load and URLs with query strings, I realised the XP install was too sick to continue.

Copied all my data off the laptop onto a USB enclosure took hours, so that ran overnight.

Trying out Ubuntu Live

On Monday, I took a look at the cover DVD from the latest issue of Linux Format (May 2008). I noticed one of the distributions was Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, so I burnt that to a CD, and started up the laptop with the live disk.

It's one of the really clever things about Ubuntu, the install disk is actually a live distribution, so you can try it out, see if the Gnome Desktop, networking and USB works okay before committing to an install.

Playing around Tuesday evening, the basics seemed to be working. The sites that I permanently have open in tabs worked. The web interface to Twitter worked, but the text-field and character counter were quite unresponsive. I was a little surprised that Ubuntu came bundled with Firefox 3 beta 5 as the default browser, instead of the production stable Firefox 2.

Installing Ubuntu and applications

With nothing really to lose I went ahead and installed Ubuntu, which took no time at all. Its ironic that installing Ubuntu today felt as smooth as installing Windows 98 back in the last century, and installing Windows 2000 afresh a few weeks ago felt like installing a 0.5 version of Slackware back from 1995. How times have changed. Well less than an hour later I was logged into Ubuntu running natively on my laptop.

Since the base system installed so quickly, that left most of Wednesday evening going through all of the additional packages picking out bits of software I wanted. This is the biggest collection of software I have ever seen - so it took a few hours. Unlike my previous non-serious installs of Linux installations, I thought I would just get the software items that I felt I genuinely needed right now, (except for a few urges, like Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based wargame that I remember Tom blogging about a while back, and LinCity).

The main reason I've felt locked into Windows was Chessbase and its engines. I normally run Shredder 7 on this particular laptop, using it to work through and summarise SuperGM chess tournaments on my blog Chess Vault. This might be the main sticking point if I couldn't find a decent replacement on Ubuntu. I'd prefer not to have a third laptop just for that.

I let the application and package install run overnight. When I woke up the next morning the install popped up a dialog box for dokuwiki, asking for the URL path I wanted it running on. I accepted the default, but the installer seemed to just hang a few minutes later. After waiting about ten minutes for a sign of further progress I Alt-Ctrl-Backspaced out, and rebooted the laptop. (Turns out the dokuwiki installer was just expecting me to press Enter a few times.)

Everything seemed to start okay. I reopened the package manager which immediately spotted that the last install run had failed and it provided me with a terminal command to attempt to repair this. I opened the terminal window, and sudo'ed the command, only to find that sudo was broken. (Which seemed odd, since the GUI version accepted my password when I opened the package manager). A Google search revealed that sudo was indeed broken on the default install, and it had to do with the network settings, which didn't contain a mapping of my laptop hostname to 127.0.0.1. That took a few goes fixing through the Networking Dialogue, which is not very intuitive when adding/changing host lookups. But I eventually got the configuration added (I couldn't do it on the command line because it needed sudo).

With sudo fixed, running the repair command ran through cleanly, and I had Ubuntu running with Apache, web development tools, subversion, LinCity, Oolite, plus XBoard and Crafty (for chess), and the Pidgin IM client which had no problems connecting using my Yahoo IM profile.

Tweaking the install

I spent the next couple of days using Ubuntu like that, just getting used to its look and feel (including the 'fade-out' of various applications that were slow in responding). Just building confidence and trust with the system.

Saturday I tried out XBoard, and that responded fine. I decided to install scid - an open source chess database, and that again, just worked, even Crafty was configured by default as one of the analysis engines. That allowed me to finish off a chess blog post I was halfway through writing before XP failed on me.

Sunday I was quickly frustrated by Twitter's web client's sluggish response. So I dived into the package manager and found Twitux, which looked like a decent Twitter client, and came with the option of running from the system toolbar. Also installed a simple Bittorrent client - one which does just one torrent at a time. That takes me a step backward from the comfort of the official BitTorrent client which can handle multiple torrents. I just need to dig out the official client from the package manager.

The main customisation of the desktop is to switch off the animation, which felt sluggish, and not necessary for me. And adding a third workspace to the workspace switcher. That gives me one workspace for Firefox and general surfing, one workspace for Scid, and one workspace with Bluefish. Bluefish is for writing my blogposts, and I'm thinking I'm comfortable enough to start using for my main web development tool. It feels like an adequate replacement of Textpad.

What I'm liking

I've plugged in two random USB Flash drives, as well as my USB hard drive enclosure, and they just seamlessly worked. Grabbed an mp3 and double clicked it, Totem realised it didn't have the necessary codecs to play so it fired up a search in package manager to find the Gstreamer codecs which installed quickly and the mp3 just worked.

Scid, and the Crafty analysis worked by default. Bluefish just worked. Pidgin Instant Messaging client just worked. Twitux just worked.

And I'm liking the Workspace switcher. That helps me multitask so much better. The CPU is churning away analysing a position, and I'm doing something else in the meantime, knowing the results are just a workspace away. My external LCD monitor feels a little redundant right now, its been off for several days now.

What I didn't like

The del.icio.us toolbar doesn't offer the option to install because Firefox 3 beta is too new. I guess I need to wait until Yahoo! update it. I suppose I can live with the del.icio.us bookmarklets for a while.

Sudo being broken by default (because of a hosts setting on networking), that was a little irritating. The fix took a while to apply because the networking dialogue wasn't intuitive. I was adding the host entry, saving, closing and reopening, and the entry was gone. The solution was to edit an existing entry with the 127.0.0.1 address, then save, and then disable and re-enable networking.

In Firefox I normally right-click on links and open them in a new tab. In Firefox 3 on Ubuntu, sometimes the context menu appears, but sometimes the "Save bookmark" dialogue, or Firebug opens, or Evolution (the email client) opens instead of the context menu. I haven't tracked down why this happens, my current gut feeling (untested) is that links without attached JavaScript events are okay, but those with attached events pull up Firebug. Maybe I should look into downgrading to Firefox 2 instead.

My online banking system doesn't support Firefox 3, or anything outside of a PC or Mac (according to their website). But that's because I have a crap bank than issues with Ubuntu or Firefox.

Conclusion

After a few very minor hiccups, Ubuntu is starting to grow on me. I haven't got dual monitors running yet - that's something I thought I would need to do at first, but I'm starting to feel fairly comfortable with the convenience of the workspace switcher. At the moment, Scid is chugging away analysing a position from Kramnik's game against Gelfand from Corus Wijk aan Zee earlier this year. I'm just blogging away with Bluefish, sometimes forgetting that the chess engine is still chugging away.

At the moment, it's satisfactory. Scid isn't completely up to the levels of Chessbase, I certainly haven't set it up properly yet. My next step is to get a stronger analysis engine, so to figure out how to get Fruit working with it (Fruit, a very strong chess engine, is yet another package that's already in the massive list of Ubuntu software list). Time will tell whether Ubuntu offers enough chessic software for me to forget about needing Shredder 7 installed. There's always the potential option of Chessbase and Wine.

Just after I'd installed the base system, the very next day Canonical announced that the 8.04 version - Hardy Heron, was now release-ready, and that it is the version that benefits from Long Term Support - guaranteed support for 3 years. Looks like I timed the leap to Ubuntu very well!

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