I'm all sorted at work now - I've left my Windows environment to atrophy and am using Ubuntu 7.04 as my main environment. What have I found?

The good:

• It's worth it just for the decent console.
• Windows magically change height to match as you drag from screen to screen. My Mac could do with this!
• The font rendering is vastly improved other past attempts, although the fonts themselves could use a few touch-ups.
• The package management is quite comprehensive and rather handy.
• Gnome session saving is handy.
• It doesn't lock up when IO occurs, unlike Win XP.
• It also loads a hell of a lot faster than XP.

The bad:

• The package repository has notable exceptions, such as the compatibility libraries needed for Fedora Directory Server (and present in older versions).
• Swing compatibility problems about. XToolkit won't work with Beryl, but MToolkit leads to horrible problems with rendering with more standard window managers, such as sometimes blocking text input.
• Speaking of Swing, the GTK+ theme is terrible - it drops textures, borders and sometimes doesn't draw menus. And Metal /Motif are just plain ugly.
• The menu editor is just plain ugly, and similar to a trip back in time.
• The Window Manager crashed on me one day, and the session saving ensured it didn't start up again. Hence auto-session saving is best left off.
• gEdit doesn't pick up file permission changes, hence if you have to make a file rewritable you'll be reloading it.

The Ugly

• I'm pleasantly surprised to say there's nothing really to whine about there - there are plenty of little niggles but it's solid and overall works quite well.

All in all, well worth the jump for development. And you get geek points - huzzah!

We have so very little to do at work at present. And so I've been setting up a dual-boot install of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Beta, partly to kill some time but also as Windows lockup up on IO is killing me. Anti-virus protection is not helping matters. Oh, and a decent console would rock my world.

The good news: It all works out of the box. It lacks a bit of polish, but having worked on UI before I know the polish takes forever (seriously, it really does). Setup was painless, including resizing my NTFS partition. Almost everything went smoothly, except for it sitting on '0:00 remaining' on the language download (which you can, thankfully, skip). A bit more feedback is in order - the partition tool was not as clear as it could have been (e.g. you hit 'next' to resize the partition, and then get returned to the same page to do the remainder of your allocation), and the resize was completely oblique, with just an hourglass keeping time. Nevertheless, it all worked and the nastiest thing it did was make Linux the default boot OS.

I did need to arse around with xorg.conf to get any resolutions above 1024x768 though, which wasn't so good - it's the sort of thing that should be covered by default. Dual-head also needed a quick trip to the command line. And then all was well, until i decided to be clever and left the bounds of good society. Stop reading here if you're not a techy. Really.

I've seen a lot of Compiz and Beryl, 3D acceleration UI support for X with all the snazzy (and sometimes pointless but nevertheless very pretty) effects that such implies. Unfortunately, setup proved to be a pain in the arse. My workstation has an ATi X600. Unfortunately, the official ATi drivers need Xgl. So, I installed Xgl, and hacked around to get the Beryl packages with Xgl support (as the default universe ones lack such). All was good, except for my second monitor - it showed a screen, but I couldn't move the mouse onto it (oddly enough, I could see the pointer tail over the side of the screen - it just wouldn't go any further). Google and the Ubuntu forums were unenlightening, and so I decided to go back to the open ATi driver and AIGLX.

This worked a little better. I got it all working with dual-head, but for one thing - I had to have the monitors marked as being above one another. Why? ATi cards only support 2048x2048 textures, and the Beryl developers just treat the desktop as one big texture. Hence you can have 2 1280x1024 screens vertically, but not horizontally. This did terrible things with my window positioning, and after Java started playing silly buggers with redraws I surrendered and turned off Beryl.

Nevertheless, all was well until I strayed off the beaten path. It did remind me why I use a Mac at home. However, I'm still keen to move off Windows at work, which is a bit of an indictment of XP. (I won't even comment on Vista - I've a copy of Home Premium at work, and really can't be arsed upgrading when XP MCE is doing what I need it to.) Also, I can't comment too much on the polish, given this is a beta release - traditionally (e.g. when Google and Yahoo aren't using it) beta means major-feature complete and rather buggy - so some benefit of the doubt is in order.

And, of course, it does give me more geek-cred at work! Ah, the trials of employment...

At work we use the world's worst version control system (VCS). Actually I kid - we're not using Microsoft SourceSafe. As previously mentioned we're using MKS, which lacks Mac support. So I went out and purchased a copy of Parallels and sent up Ubuntu.

This proved to be harder than was expected. Firstly, because the fine people who package Ubuntu decided to use the GPL implementation of Java, which didn't work with anything useful. So after installing Sun Java I moved on to directory servers. This got worse - Sun Application Server wouldn't install, due to missing shared libraries, and so I tried Fedora Directory Server. Even with a HowTo I haven't managed to get the admin interface working, not to mention the need to track down extra packages from Ubuntu 5 and hack, hack, hack. Sigh. But, finally, a working environment. However, he thought does occur that I would have been finished much earlier had I just installed Windows.

Parallels is quite a nice beast though. It's affordable (£40) and fairly solid. The sound support is a bit spotty (or Ubuntu is, it's hard to tell) and there's no dual-head support, but it's fast enough (using the current beta) for work to get done.

On a similar note, CodeWeavers have finally released their long promised August beta of CrossOver Office. It all seems very nice - much easier to get going than Darwine, obviously - and unlike Darwine is running Steam and has almost finished installing Half-life 2. So it appears I may have to do some stress testing tonight ... oh, the sacrifices we make.

Plus, there's a nice warm geeky feeling in running Steam alongside Ubuntu under Parallels while browsing NetNewsWire...

I have previously bitched about my experiences of PPTP under Ubuntu - a right pain to set up, but on the other hand setting up split routing (i.e. work traffic goes via VPN, Internet via my ISP) was dead easy. On the Mac, however, the complete opposite applies. While the ghost of Ned Ludd himself could get a PPTP connection going on Mac OS X 10.4, you'll need to be handy with a text editor to cope with split routing.

 My solution came from a thread at the often handy MacOSXHints. However, the default route kept being added, despite my efforts. Hence I ended up forcing it to 192.168.1.1 in my ip-up script - hardley the most elegant of solutions but it's got me going again.

 Of course, it irrelevant really - I can't use Mac OS X for work due to their use of the rather rubbish MKS for source control and issue tracking - proof that Canadians have it in for us. MKS kindly supply version for Windows, Linux and Solaris (note the absent member) which is a half-hearted effort given it's mostly in Java, with a few JNI libraries scattered where they'll do the most harm. I wouldn't mind if it was good, but, well, I'll stick with "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all".

There's been a lot of talk recently about Ubuntu. Claims have been made that it is the one distribution to rule them all, that it spells the final death knell for closed-source operating systems and there have even been some switchers from Mac OS X. Given the noise I thought it was about time I gave it a try (especially since my DSL has just been upgraded to 8mbps). So I pulled down the live CD for AMD64 and spun it up on my games machine.

I must admit it was a nicer experience than when I last tried a Linux desktop. Most things were there, sound worked, the display worked and almost all default were sensible. AA text wasn't up to OS X standards, nor did it default to sub-pixel AA, but that's fairly minor really. I couldn't read my NTFS partition but that was survivable. And all ports on my card-reader were detected, which was more than one could say for RedHat 9 (yes, somewhat old these).

So I was left with two quibbles, one minor and one a show-stopper. Firstly, I loaded up GPartEd. The thought “I wonder if this can resize NTFS partitions?” leaps across my frontal lobes. So I click the “Help” option. The results were not quite as expected - “This feature is not yet supported”. It then suggests I look on the web-site. So I load up my web browser - and this lead to the show-stopper.

No WiFi. I've got a common-as-muck RT2500 based card in the machine. The WiFi control panel showed the driver and gave me a chance to enter SSID and key. Unfortunately, while it said the connection was now active there was arse all happening. Indeed it confirmed it just wasn't talking to my DHCP server when it gave the card an IPv6 address. Whoops.

Some browsing of the Ubuntu forums revealed that apparently the RT2500 driver doesn't work with the control panel. It's a shame they didn't add a message to that effect. Or, indeed, that an appropriate error message wasn't shown when the card didn't connect. I had thought Mac OS X took the biscuit for the most useless error messages when WiFi went awry, but it has been outdone. Which is a shame as it really spoiled the experience for me, and up until that point I had been very impressed with the work that had been done.

But don't get me wrong - this is certainly an impressive package and this is how Linux is going to get mind-share: distributions that just work. The computing world would be well served by having no single dominant operating system and this is certainly a nice addition to the pack.