Refreshing Mint makes the breath sweeter!

Now that Canonical has totally lost their way and turned the Ubuntu desktop into a pig's breakfast of inutility and ugliness (and that's only the beginning of their sins against a platform they thought had reached too great a height and decided to destroy), I've gone looking for something better and think I've found it...

...in Linux Mint. I've chosen (a bit arbitrarily since I haven't really experienced Mate) Cinnamon as the UI for my desktop.

So far, I've been very pleased with everything. Because of evolution in how Mint implements /etc/resolv.conf, I'm unable to get my employer's VPN running, but I've got other hardware still running Ubuntu Maverick and can use that until I'm able to deal with the problem. All my other productivity software is loaded and I've been running for a couple of days quite pleased so far. The installation wasn't too bad after over-coming a problem with the fact that I sit behind my employer's proxy.

What's nice is to come into a working desktop that appears unlikely to freeze the way my Ubuntu Precise desktop has almost since the day I installed it last December. Since then, I've had a couple of experiences with that platform and they've been mostly negative. I write software for a living; I don't know what's behind Canonical's insistence upon the Unity desktop nor some of the other changes they've made, but it's not helpful to my day-to-day productivity. Lucid/Maverick worked fine for me; Natty/Oneiric were pretty much just plain broken and Precise/Quantal were more stable, but demonstrated that Canonical was not going to give choices back to us.

Linux Mint is pretty much a "corrected" Ubuntu and, I hope, the awaited heir to Ubuntu's long-time superiority in the Linux world. Mint is apparently the fourth most popular desktop for home use (behind Windows, Macintosh and presumably Ubuntu, but that's changing fast by all reports). Actually, among Linux desktops, Mint is now the premier download.

I still run and am completely pleased with Precise server for all my server needs. I don't forsee changing that until Canonical releases their next LTS platform which, I hope, will continue to be dynamite.

I'll move to Mint at home as soon as I can juggle my hardware. Then, I'll move my web server from Lucid desktop to Precise and put the box over by my ESXi hardware. Fun times!

A new era begins...

I began putting a period to a blessed life pre-Unity today at work as I relegated my primary development host, running Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat, to second fiddle while I picked up and am now playing (identical HP hardware) on Precise Pangolin with Unity (12.04LTS).

I really do not like Unity as compared to Gnome. I develop software and I can't see how using Unity helps me do that better than using Gnome. Mostly, it gets in my way.

And chasing Unity off and restoring Gnome isn't fun and easy, nor was it altogether successful the time I tried it last November. I don't just want Gnome, mind you, I want it exactly how I've had it and I could not reach that point in the few hours I allotted to the experiment. I also don't want to have to hack every new OS I install, so before fleeing Ubuntu altogether, I'm going to see how badly my productivity is afflicted by Unity.

So here I am with about half my crucial development tools running on the newer operating system and the ones that don't still running under Maverick. Principally, I can't get Remmina to work and I need it to replace tsclient. I'm also struggling with Thunderbird in some ways. Today I finally got it set up to do my HP mail, but then it refused to do my personal mail.

The reason for this bothersome detour from productive life? Lucid Lynx LTS expires next April. Maverick already expired last April.

At home I'm going to be undertaking much the same journey if with less angst about how fast and well it works.

Cloning good equipment...

Last November's build of a Windows 7 box was a qualified success. I'm equivocating only because, a month after building it, I lost the motherboard and had to get a replacement from Intel. It was the luck of the draw and Intel created no obstacles to the exchange although they waited for my old board to arrive before sending me out the new one. (With Dell Computers, you have the new component in hand within a day or so and can then simply reuse the packaging to return the defective component.)

Since replacement, I have had no other trouble attributable to the hardware.

I have had grief with Windows 7 supporting peripheral devices. It simply will not support my internal card reader, my external card reader or my HP Deskjet 5550 printer. As always, I'm willing to admit humbly that I'm a total idiot, but seriously, do you think a platform is really a popular, turn-key solution for the masses if a career software engineer can't overcome what should be simply plug-and-play after several hours bent over the problem? (And Google says I'm not alone!)

Well, I've also got a Linux box next to me, running Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.4), but it's just too slow to do my development work on. I find, in particular, that launching the Android device emulator from Eclipse takes more than just "for freaking ever" (as many places on the web say about launching that emulator normally) and is simply intolerable as compared to my Windows box which is long, but tolerable. I think it's the horsepower in my case.

After nearly a year ignoring Linux as my main development host (Avocent was a decidedly Windows shop), I've grown lonesome and decided to clone last year's build to build for myself a competent Linux host again.

So, here's my build-out, arriving from TigerDirect today; I'm a little tamer and it's costing me about $200 less with much more disk (although I later added a 1Tb, unmirrored disk to my existing Windows system):

Case          Ultra X-Blaster Black ATX Mid-Tower
Power Supply  Ultra LSP550 550-Watt SATA-ready, SLI-ready 135mm Fan
Intel Mobo    DP55WB Micro ATX, Intel P55 Express Chipset
CPU           Intel Core i5 750 2.66GHz, 8Mb L3 cache, Quad-Core Lynnfield
DDR3 Memory   2 OCZ 4Gb DDR3 PC10666 1333MHZ 4096Mb
Video Card    GeForce 9500GT 1Gb PCI-E 2.0 VD 01G-P3-N958-LR
Hard Drives   2 Seagate 1Tb LP SATA
Optical Drive LightScribe DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM

Additionally, this will allow me to take that otherwise nice if slow box running nevertheless modern Linux here and use it as a replacement for my old web server still running openSuSE 10.2.

I'm running my two, five-year old Dell 20" wide-aspect monitors for now (3360 x 1050 pixels total) until I swap my bigger Asus pair from the Windows 7 box to Linux.

The hard drives would be arranged in RAID 1 but for the fact that Ubuntu desktop doesn't support RAID. In order to do RAID, you must either use Ubuntu server or an alternate non-GUI installation that only supports Karmic (one release backward) at this hour. So, my installation of Lucid Lynx 64-bit 10.4 was successful and I've built the disks as follows (hoping to facilitate setting up with RAID 1 later):

  16 Gb swap   (/dev/sda)
  80 Gb /
 904 Gb /home
1000 Gb /home2 (/dev/sdb)

I have excellent news: the Android emulator starts up on Linux as quickly as it does on my Windows host. I'm back in business.