All this while I’ve been using Ubuntu on my Thinkpad and have been very happy with only a few minor complaints such as the non-functional multi-monitor utility and compiz fusion not working until 8.10. Now I decided to give KDE a try so I installed Kubuntu-desktop and logged into KDE 4.1!!! Oooh drool!!! The unreleased Windows 7 (scroll down to milestone 3) is already behind. See my new desktop after a few minor tweaks and adding a few plasmoids (screen widgets).
Windows Vista has many new nice features but it faces severe criticism and omitted several announced high profile features such as WinFS and now it seems that the next Windows (Windows 7) will be out next year.
IMHO, because of Vistas failure and everybody wanting XP, maybe Microsoft should hire the guy who made this - BricoPack Vista Inspirat Ultimate 2 and make XP + BricoPack + a few of Vistas good features the next Windows. Personally I’ve not tried Vista because none of the computers I own are even “Vista Capable”, forget Premium ready and XP runs just fine on them. My Computer at Work says “Vista Capable” (but was ordered with XP and I do have the option to upgrade to Vista) but our internal processes are not Vista ready yet and a majority of our users are currently being upgraded from 2000 to XP!
Here is Ubuntu’s (Hardy Beta) window switcher (using compiz) on hardware that won’t even run Vista with Aero. 2GHz processor, 512MB RAM, Intel Integrated Graphics with 32MB memory.
Here is a screenshot of my Ubuntu Desktop at work. Check out the vista menu and the Mac Dock (install awn-manager from Synaptic)
I inserted my XP CD again and selected Setup instead of Repair. It didn’t even recognize the Windows partition as NTFS. So basically Windows update destroyed more than just a few files. I formatted the partition, ran XP setup again. Ofcourse now XP destroyed my MBR and I couldn’t get to Ubuntu. So I fire up the other computer, google is my friend, find a way to restore the ubuntu MBR, boot into linux. Copy all the downloaded drivers to another NTFS partition (not the Windows one in case I lose it again). Finally I have internet going. This time around, I skip doing all the Windows updates together, install Zone Alarm and AVG and turn on automatic updates. I can wait a week while the updates can go on in the background.
If Windows XP fails again this time, I’ll just have to live with not doing any VS.NET development on the laptop - like I have been for a long time now. I do have some other options like the Mono VB.NET Support but that remains a task for the future.
Finally I replaced the dying hard drive on my Thinkpad and went on to install both XP and Ubuntu. First I installed XP because I’ve had trouble installing it second before. I couldn’t use the XP that came with the Thinkpad because that was on a corrupt partition on the old HDD that was dying. So I found another XP CD and installed. It didn’t have the drivers for either the wired or the wireless ethernet so I couldn’t go online to download the rest of the drivers (video, audio, touchpad etc.)
Next I installed Ubuntu. It found drivers for everything and was working right out of the box. This new 7.10 version finally fixed all the problems I had with 6.06 (such as crappy wireless settings, no hibernation etc.) and nearly everything just worked right out of the box. Once Ubuntu was installed I managed to download all the windows drivers for the laptop. I got the wired lan working on the thinkpad. XP refused to accept that the wireless drivers were correct so I had to force it to use the drivers that I gave it. Finally the wireless was working and I started Windows Update after activating the copy of Windows.
At some point during the Windows Update, a power failure made the internet connection go away and Windows Update stopped downloading further updates and started installing all the downloaded updates, then asked me to reboot. So I reboot and now Windows will not start saying it cannot find ntoskrnl.exe. I boot in Ubuntu and look for the file. The file exists but it is of unknown size and of unknown type (other exes are all labelled as DOS/Windows executable) which means that Windows update put in a corrupt file.
Back goes in my XP CD and I select Repair this time which puts me at a command prompt. I type “dir” and I get an error telling me it cannot show me the directory. So my Windows is completely busted. I have been living without Windows on the laptop for over a year now because my previous Windows installation also died thaks to HD corruption but Ubuntu lived on and was able to atleast boot in command prompt and I could run fsck and fix hard drive errors and reboot with a gui.
The only reason I need Windows is to run Visual Studio.NET so I will give it another try, maybe I’ll just give VMware a try and install Windows in a virtual environment and do away with a separate install.
A few months ago, the Windows installation on my home laptop crashed irrecoverably. Windows will not boot in regular or safe mode or any other way. I have no intention of reinstalling Windows and I could not repair it from installation disks. In fact even the repair partition on the Thinkpad will not boot. Thankfully I had an Ubuntu Linux (6.06 LTS - Long Term Support - Dapper Drake) partition with which I dual boot.
I’ve started using Anjuta for web development. I have Opera and Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird for Email, Open Office for Word/Powerpoint/Excel, VLC to play movies/music etc. So far I don’t miss any applications that I had under windows except SQLYog (there are Linux replacements but SQLYog is my favorite) and I have that working very well with Wine. I can also get to my Windows partitions and get any files that I need.
My first minor complaint is inconvenient wireless setup - the Dapper Drake wireless is good enough for my purpose but not really very nice. It seems Ubuntu has improved the wireless features in their latest release Fiesty, however I will wait for the next LTS release before I upgrade.
My only other complaint - not so minor - is that Hibernation does not work.
Hopefully a future version will fix that.
If you search for Oracle GUI Clients in Google, you turn up with nothing. After some more hunting, I found TOAD. I have been using the Free version of TOAD for a few weeks now but it is very annoying and has to be updated often. Also it can only make one connection at a time. The price of the full version > 800$!!
That’s an outrage, especially for us MySQL folks who can get SQLYog for free (which works perfectly well in Linux with wine).
A few days back I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on a new computer at work and was hunting for an Oracle client and I found TOra, an open source Oracle Client. I still haven’t got it connecting to Oracle from Ubuntu and the Windows version won’t even run. Hunting for ways to make it work, I found SQL Developer - which is made by Oracle themselves and is free. If only Oracle would have mentioned this on the download page for InstantClient, it would have saved me a few hours of searching, tinkering and complaining about a lack of choice in Oracle clients.
SQLDeveloper is a cross platform Java Oracle client and it is free and does everything that TOAD does as far as I can tell. No more TOAD for me.
Concat:
Most of the database queries I run at some point are used to generate HTML and rather than go through the results of the query and add HTML to it in PHP or Ruby code, I like to get this out of the query itself.
So in MySQL my queries often look like this:
select concat(’<a href=pagename.php?varid=”‘, varname, ‘”>’, varid, ‘</a>’) as varlink, …..
However for the same result in Oracle, which only allows two items in the concat function,
this turns into:
select concat(’<a href=pagename.php?varid=”‘, concat(varname, concat(’”>’, concat(varid, ‘</a>’)))) as varlink, …..
If there are multiple such items, the query becomes extremely ugly with too many brackets to keep track of.
Magic Quotes:
My next complaint about Oracle is no magic quotes - string values must be in single quotes, no double quotes allowed.
One of the projects I’m working on is recreating the Surplus Property website at UVA. We are doing this in Ruby+FastCGI, which I’m using for that first time. It took me a few days to get used to programming in Ruby because it is unlike other languages. Proponents can argue that it is easier and more intuitive,
but it isn’t to people like me who are used to other languages.
Ruby itself was ok, but using FastCGI takes some getting used to especially if you are used to the conveniences of PHP. There are no easy to find session handling libraries - so you have to do it yourself. In fact there is a lot you have to do yourself including parsing for GET and POST variables and some basic code to handle FCGI requests. There is also a serious lack of documentation about using Ruby+FCGI. Thankfully I have some help from our server admin.
Debugging Ruby+FCGI applications is also not easy. When an application dies because of an error, it writes to the Apache log and all you get in the browser is a nice ‘Internal Server Error’ (you can use begin - rescue blocks but they won’t help with syntax errors). Once you use something like this, you will really appreciate the conveniences of the PHP world - easy to debug, lots of documentation and lots of users out there.
On the +ve side, FCGI apps once written are blindingly fast because the application is always running, needs no recompilation, database connections need only be made once when the app starts and that can reduce a lot of overhead. As such FCGI is nice, but has a long way to go as far as documentation and libraries go.