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How Long Does it Take You to Tweak a New Box?
An anonymous reader asks: "When you get a new computer, how long does it take to make it 'home'? On a Windows system, there seem to be a huge number of preferences I have to choose before it is really comfortable (doing things like: installing software; changing the wallpaper and color schemes; start menu layout; and so forth). How long do you have to fiddle with computer until you have it set up the way you like? Do you use any shortcuts to speed up the process?"
It'll take me a week or two, depending on the distribution, to tweak it to my liking. Some items like KDE I'll just copy over a known good install directory. If it's a system I'm transitioning to, I'll just copy $HOME over and make sure everything's nicely compiled right.
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
The time I spend tweaking the settings asymptotically approaches something like 5-10% of the time I spend on the PC.
The only real shortcut is to setup your system how you like it the first time and make a system image so you can restore it if you ever have to nuke your system. The first time is always gonna be time consuming. The only other thing I could see that would shorten the process would be to use MS's system settings transfer option to move settings from your existing box.
Also, how the heck did this one make it through the filters? Who the heck cares how long it takes people to set up their system? Although I will brag that I can assemble a new box in under 10 minutes without troubleshooting.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Let's see: /home/username dir
- copy old
- "debconf-get-selections" on old computer and pipe to "debconf-set-selections" on new one
- "dpkg -l |grep ^ii" on old computer and replicate the package list
- go drink some tea while the apt-get proceeds
- done!
I carried my home dir with its settings across about three or four new computers in the last eight years or so, and I didn't have to tweak things very much. Only upgrading major components require some maintenance, but other than that, it's simple.
That's the clincher. About a week, simply because I don't do it that often (once every 3-4 years) that I don't have a list
Classic-ize windows display settings
Give the system an enema (remove all the windows default crap, any ads or OEM-given crap)
Install the necessities (ad-aware, avg, firefox, powertools, other windows registry hax)
Install a few benchmark things and test (diablo 2, doom, zsnes, media player classic + fddshow)
Dump data from old backup. (Over my last 3 installs this was via diskettes, then CDrs, then DVDrs). Then over the next week I'll just install new stuff as needed. Winamp, AIM, mud client -- I save all these executables but by the time you do a reinstall they're outdated anyway.
You boot the old computer in Firewire mode by holding down a key. You plug in a firewire cable to the new computer. You click the install from old computer button. You go get some coffee and a bagel.
So basically, it takes me about 60 seconds and it takes the computer an hour or so. That includes pulling over my Windows and Linux desktop installs within a VM. Seriously, this is one of the main reasons OS X is my base workstation OS instead of Linux. Who wants to waste a bunch of time manually copying things over, only to find not all of it works anyway and you still have to reinstall a few things and tweak a few more?
It has probably been mentioned and I just skipped it, but just the process of securing a Windows reinstall can take days, unless you have the time to babysit the whole thing.
I have reinstalled XP a few times, from an SP1 disc. Visit Windows Update. It can't Update until I install some ActiveX stuff so I can use the latest version of the site. That done, it recommends maybe 50 or 60 updates. Reboot. Go back to the site, spend a half hour downloading SP2 and another 2 installing it. Reboot. Go back to the site. More updates, maybe only a dozen this time. Reboot. IE7. Reboot. Patch for IE7. Possibly a couple of driver updates. Reboot.
And if you leave to go to the store without accepting the EULA for the patch....more wasted time. And this whole process is just to secure the machine, no app install of setup or tweaking.
Vista seems slightly better in this regard as it can download updates during the install process, but it still isn't up to the level that most Linux distros are.
I don't even know what the OSX install process looks like, or if there even is one. And I own more Macs than anything else.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Nobody's found out how long it takes on linux, they're still working at it! ;P
I keep finding things to continue tweaking it. Earlier this year Flash 9 is out. For my kids, just last month the MTP lib came out so they can sync their Zen player. I just found a decent replacement for my stage light console program and I'm just now getting it compiled and installed (Q-Light).
Not bad as a nubie since I first installed Ubuntu when Dapper came out.
The truth shall set you free!
At this point, you have a usable machine. If it's my machine (and even if it isn't my machine), I usually install the following software:
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Actually, for me this isn't even a joke. Often I'm still tweaking things in Linux when a new version of my distro comes out. That just means that GNU/Linux development is happening at breakneck speed compared to Windows.
Agreed. I set up up, customized, and played with FC6 running cygwin on my underpowered XP laptop. /etc configurations intact.
Once that was setup, all I had to do was copy it over to my Linux server and turn on/off a couple of services that I needed on my server but not on my laptop. I mean *literally* just copied the root partition.
It then ran perfectly with all my user and
When I wanted to set up another machine, I used the same root image and only had to edit a small handfull of files to change the machine name/IP address and to change a couple of passswords.
When I upgrade to another machine, all I will need to do is copy (or even just physically move) my hard-disks.
With Windoze, because of the dang registry, you can't just copy or move disks without corrupting everything. Also, since customization is done through menus and stored in obscure parts of the registry, you can't just copy over and/or edit individual config files. Instead, you need to reinstall each application individually and then individually run the program and customize the options by going through endless menus.
I cheat. /home is auto-mounted from a NFS server. Short of telling the box to grab the automount map from LDAP, I don't need to set up any personalization. It's already there. A new box is just new hardware. I do have different application sets depending on the hardware capabilities. However, that doesn't have anything to do with personalizing the system. Rather, it has to do with why the box was built.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
Of course, unless you're inflicting pain on the penguin, but given my own installation experience I think you're the one getting the pain... and apparently enjoying it.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en& q=osx+subversion&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
s ubversion-client-1.3.1.dmg
1st hit:
http://metissian.com/projects/macosx/subversion/
Nice installer:
http://metissian.com/downloads/macosx/subversion/
Actually, the last time I moved from a Powerbook to a MacBook Pro I used Tiger's Migration Assistant. After the copy finished (about 2 hours) almost everything (applications, preferences, backgrounds, altered command keys, control panel changes, accounts, folder layouts, etc.) was there. I had to reinstall Dreamweaver and Photoshop since their registration mechanisms detected the new hardware and "broke", but other than that I was impressed to no end.
Contrast that to the last new Windows machine (XP) I bought, when I had to move everything by hand, reset everything by hand, and spent about a week reinstalling each and every application I used... by hand.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Home Servers: a little longer because I have so much damned 1-off stuff on them. I guess the same goes for the enterprise ones.
/home && tar -zxvf username.tgz' after doing the install. A couple of other minor tweaks in the init scripts (I've yet to find a distro that does everything exactly the way I like) is usually in order too.
Desktops: not much more than 'cd
After countless wipes and rebuilds of my Windows XP Pro OS.... I got tired of installing my applications and tweaking windows to my liking. I'm working (mostly done) on building an unattended install CD (Soon to be DVD/USB Memory Stick/Network Boot...whichever I find most clever). At this point in the game I've got SP2 slipstreamed on the CD, as well as all the critical hotfixes and drivers for my system. I've also configured silent installs for most of my applications. For those applications I am unable to install silently w/ switches I am using http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/ to create scripted installs.
I recommend checking out the guide at http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/ for more information. As well there are many helpful forum trolls to give you advice on issues you might come up against.
It takes a bit of time/effort to get it working. But it is worth it in the end to be able to slip in a CD or a DVD and coming back to a fully functioning system tailored to your liking.
Good luck.
Definitely gotta have my .vimrc too. It's followed me for a long time.
What I do is keep sort of a manifest-slash-backup-script of my important stuff. I never want to backup my entire home dir because directories like ~/.kde can produce some very undesirable results when restoring it. So I just keep a script like:
I just use an nfs or sshfs mount as my destination. So when I restore it, I can just install my core apps and be ready to roll.
I do other things to make my visual tweaks faster. For example, I like to rotate my backgrounds often amongst a collection of wallpapers, so I have a directory ~/Documents/Pictures/Wallpapers/rotate which contains symlinks to my favorite images so I can just go in and select-all in that directory.
I use a combination of google's browser sync (for cookies and such) and yahoo's toolbar (really just for bookmarks) so my browser is instantly usable even if I don't keep my entire ~/.mozilla directory.
Probably a good testimony to how well that works for me is when my laptop hd died a couple of months ago. While the new drive was in transit, I was just booting from the kubuntu cd and running linux from there. I had enough space on the ram disk to install firefox and a couple of the other packages I needed and it worked fairly well.
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
>>The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason
:)
>>they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill
>>Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important
>>that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had
>>to essentially lobotomize it.
>Um, no, not quite
Oh, I disagree.
Consider these related points:
1. All other commercially available operating systems use flat files to store configuration information. And almost every other operating system out there works better than Windows in a variety of ways, not least of which being performance.
2. Operating systems that use flat files to store configuration information are trivially easy to back up. They're also trivially easy to clone and distribute.
3. People who run operating systems that use flat files tend to READ those flat files. The registry, on the other hand, is so huge and byzantine (again, WHY???) that finding entries in it is like going on a fishing expedition. Nobody really knows what's in their registry. I believe this is by design, not by accident.
4. The registry is IN FACT used to make piracy difficult. Virtually every piece of commercial Windows software stores registration information in the registry, usually in literally dozens of different locations so that to clear out a botched install you have to use a search tool and guess at all the possible names the company may have used for its keys. First, do you think Microsoft isn't doing the same thing??? Second, do you think this isn't by design???
5. When a hacker creates a Word Macro Virus and the cops catch him like, a week later, how do you think that happens? Word, installed, puts serial number information in the registry and later, into documents. Again, by design.
6. When they spent millions of dollars building Windows 95 and created long filename support, do you think it was by mistake that they just happened to leave long filename support out of their new version of DOS? Or that you couldn't boot to a command prompt that had long filename support? Again, it was to make piracy difficult. At the time, you couldn't boot to a CD. You had to use a floppy. Live CDs didn't even exist. And there was NO WAY to boot with a floppy and get long filename support. So where before you could use pkzip to zip up your whole windows and dos directory and back up your system to about twenty floppies, with Windows 95 you were basically hosed. Even if you DID zip up all the directories, when you unzipped them during the restore process they'd look like "Progra~1" instead of "Program Files" and you'd be hosed.
IF YOU ARE CORRECT, you must have a reasonable justification for the use of the registry that is credibly better than using a flat-file approach. I bet you don't have one.
NO CARRIER
*shrug*
I'm as much an MS hater as anyone else, but still, "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence", or something like that, anyways.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Hmm... OSX would be one to disagree with you there (netinfo is not in flat files and neither is LDAP). OSX does have flat files on the BSD end but they aren't the ones you configure with the gui. The os that used netinfo before OSX was NeXTSTEP and everyone thought it was a bad idea then too. There is also the gconf database that Gnome uses, while similar to the registry in function it uses the file system directories for hierarchy and xml files for storage so it is easy to edit by hand if you need to.
Not to knock flat files (I prefer them myself) but one could say the same about finding them. The registry was designed to be a structured database of configuration data, Microsoft just screwed things up badly with it.
Umm... no. If you look at Microsoft's reference documentation on how companies should and should not use the windows registry I think you will note that the locations where things *should* be stored are quite well defined. Microsoft themselves may have issues with using there own standards but I have never found anti-piracy to be one of their reasons for being incompetent.
Now you are starting to sound paranoid. Can you point out the place in a word document where a serial number is kept? Give me a link or I call BS. I know it is stored in the registry (Where else do you think it would be?) but so are several other bits of license related data. HINT: it is not called an install code, it's called a license key. If you removed the key from the registry it stops working and asks for a key when you start it up.
IIRC this feature was included in the version of DOS that shipped with Windows 98 so that must not have been their reasoning otherwise they would have left it out.
Hmm... I can think of 2 design decisions why a databased approach to configuration has advantages.
20 minutes to install Ubuntu, maybe 30 minutes to dupe all my home directory stuff over, and 20 minutes to install packages from a honking apt-get line. Though that last bit doesn't count, I can still continue to work while that's going on.