Slashdot Mirror
Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non-Linux Geeks
twigles writes "I'm a network engineer, meaning I spend my days dealing with things like selective route advertisements, peering, and traffic engineering; I'm not a Linux admin or developer. About 6 months ago I finally got fed up enough with my experience on Windows XP to jump ship to Ubuntu 8.04, despite not having much Linux experience, particularly on the desktop. Read my ramblings for an engineer's take on taking what can be a pretty intimidating plunge for us Linux noobcakes."
No offense but this isn't very enlightening or insightful.
Repeat after me, you are not an engineer.
Until you go through the same hell in college that degreed mechanical/electrical/aero/civil engineers go through in college and have a chance to obtain a PE, you are not an engineer.
Submit an article. Get people to view your hair style. Profit ??
FTFA:
So, what he's looking for is how to make a boot in Ubuntu take more than 20 minutes?
From TFA: "Also, there's no SCP or SFTP feature that I can find comparable to SecureCRT."
I don't know what SecureCRT is like, but you can use the file manager as SFTP client and bookmark pages if you want to. Or you can install Filezilla (the new version can handle SFTP also). Not sure what version comes with Ubuntu 8.04.
For password management try using KeePassX http://www.keepassx.org/
It's free and cross platform.
From the submission:
My experience in switching from Windows XP to Ubuntu 8.04 has not been all positive, but overall I'm incredibly glad I did it. I used to hate my entire computing experience, now I just hate my email client. My coworkers say things like, "wow, it took Notepad over 10 seconds to load," and I chuckle. It's tempting to interpret this to mean Windows would be a better choice in an environment not bogged down by constant security scanning and filtering, and to some degree that's accurate. However I've found that most of the pain in switching comes from having to tinker a little to get the Linux equivalent of your Windows program working.
Remember the author had time to try to make things work. How many folks have time to tinker with text config files or a system help mechanism that is incomplete at best? I wish Linux fan boys can put their bigotry aside and listen for once.
For Linux to become main stream the following must happen.
Support for relevant applications, out of the box - not via a separate repository that must be enabled. (Key word, - relevant)
A single API for applications so that "Linux" is one platform, not many that must be supported for many versions. Without this, all efforts to make Linux the mainstream are thinned, customers get confused which leads to less adoption.
A single desktop, so that Linux is one desktop, not several. Otherwise the other efforts, such as the help desk, marketing and research all multiply their efforts making everything impractical.
I am sure those waiting for this to happen will love KDE 4.2 which will be released in 2 days. Trust me, it's a different animal all together. Things actually work and work well in the coming release. The earlier releases were a total disaster.
Hello sir,
I think i read that KeepPassX can be used in Linux and Windows,
using the same repository.
Check it out!
Cheers
I think the guy's main point was "give it a try, you might just like it". It didn't sound in any way like he was trying to make you a convert, it was more for someone like him who as come to not exactly enjoy their windows experience due to all the bloat of modern day security apps business tend to require.
I ain't a fan of Linux but even I can do more than this dufus.
The only things he told us that he ran on virtualized Windows were Microsoft Visio and the password manager. With a viable alternative to Visio, he might not have been tempted to set up virtualized Windows in the first place. What would you have used to replace Visio?
Just export as PDF.
This is something that I still don't get: Why do businesses require all printable documents to be written in a WRITABLE format? Oh, right. Word doesn't have one by default. Why Innovate when you got 100% of the market?
Not only is he a nobody he offers little unique insight
GASP! Wow, I never thought about it. You're ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, Mr. Anonymous Coward!
Great attitude you got there! At least the AC seems to have bothered to RTFA.
Why did he not replace Visio with Dia?
A pretty impressive set of tools, now you only left out this one
.. :)
--
click on reply, nothing happens, fire up textpad and type in what you were going to say, before you forget, back to slashdot as the page has finally loaded
It's Linux/GNU you insensitive clod!
But seriously, I think he meant Ubuntu as in the general name for the entire system; linux is only the kernel, GNU are only a core set of the tools, and Ubuntu is the glue that holds it together.
As for all distros being 99% the same: try using both Slackware and Ubuntu and we'll talk about it again. That would be like saying winME, XP and Vista are all 99% the same.
And don't even get me started on LFS (linux from scratch) :)
Do you D?
Apparently my morning coffee didn't kick in yet, it's GNU/Linux, not the other way around !
Do you D?
OK, I probably shouldn't have said "all distros", perhaps "most distros" or "the major distros". Having used Fedora, SuSe, Mandriva, Debian, and Ubuntu; I can pretty confidently say all THOSE are nearly 99% the same, especially after installation.
Visio runs just fine under Codeweavers CrossOver Office. I run Visio 2003 that way, and it just works.
Good save, RMS was about to post a comment correcting your error.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
I thought nerds were usually open minded and wanted to try new stuff ?
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Let me put it this way. Linux should put [all] resources on one desktop environment which should result into a wonderful desktop while leaving the possibility of using another should there be need. What's wrong with that?
Let everyone use whatever tool they want.
Your sig:
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!
You, sir, are a hypocrite.
It sounds like the comparison you would prefer is: "Jumping from driving a Ford to a vehicle with a Kawasaki engine".
Not really. Although I thought about that before posting. Don't you hate car analogies? :) We always seem to revert to them, since it is something people can relate to... they just don't always fit quite right.
Two main problems that I'm trying to overcome:
:)
Exchange support. Evolution just doesn't cut it. It won't load my global address list and it doesn't seem to handle the "location" field for meeting invites. That means when I get an invite or try to send one I have no clue where our meeting will be.
CVS. I really like TortoiseCVS and can't find an equivalent that is as easy to use. I guess it's not a big deal, I could go back to using the cli, but what can I say, I am lazy.
Everything else has been good so far.
I've been a Linux user since 1993, when I was a student at university. Until 1998, I ran Linux as my primary OS, but kept a Windows partition on my home system to run some games. And since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. It has been a great experience so far. I didn't have any issues exchanging documents with others at work, and certainly my previous bosses didn't mind. But times change, I suppose.
I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows (XP) and Linux (Fedora 9) has been shocking, to say the least. Since you often see blogs or tech articles (like the parent post) when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years:
Linux in Exile
The short list of things I have run into in my first week of running Windows:
I haven't written yet about program look-and-feel; I'll do that soon. But I have noticed that MS Office acts differently from Notepad, from Media Player, and from the Windows local file browser.
Also, ctrl-backspace is implemented differently just about everywhere - in some cases, it backspaces to the start of the word or field (what I expect) and elsewhere it only backspaces once, and in other cases it inserts a ctrl-backspace character!
You didn't hear the Whooooooosh!! flying past you?
I suggest buying these two products:
The open source equivalences require you to build our own databases (by reading lots and lots of Slashdot), which takes too long. These two proprietary products allows you to gain Humor and Common Sense capabilities instantly.
Microsoft Outlook Web Access (if recent built on server side) works actually very well on IE7+. It has some resemblance to hotmail.com, or maybe hotmail resembles OWA. Unfortunately it scks deluxe on any other browser :(
When it comes to other things you mentioned, why not use some of the web-based alternatives?
o_O
It's so much easier to just mount the remote dir with fuse, that to use any client.
sudo apt-get install sshfs
sshfs user@host:dir/ dest/
And you're done. Use the normal file handler after that.
Don't want to type in passwords? Use ssh-keygen and ssh-add. Don't wanna type in the mount line? Just put them all in a bash script and mount them all first time you log in. Or get the old ones with 'history | grep sshfs' and tun it by typing in the number in front of the command after an exclamation mark, like so: '!679'
He seems to know know about the existence of wine, or at least he didn't mention it. Too bad.
Just because someone is a hypocrite doesn't mean they aren't right. Just thought I'd throw that out there...
zModem support is the *best* feature of SecureCRT. Much easier then the alternatives. While I've switched to PuTTY, I sure miss it.
As someone who has been switching distros like their underwear (i.e. regularly) because they each sucked, I beg to differ. Even now, SUSE Linux remains unusable to me due to their arcane menu and configuration systems. I far prefer ubuntus simplicitly - even though it is lacking in configurability in some areas, but that is nothing I can't do myself in the command line. (It sounds like a contradiction, I know. But this is how it appears to me)
For sheer "get-stuff-done" I still think ubuntu is King. But I must admit that I have not checked any other distro for more than a year, simply because I am satisfied with ubuntu.
Ok, so I reply to myself, but I am ill right now and find it hard to think properly.
Anyway, what I mean is that the last time I compared distros, ubuntu was the only one that tried not to get in the way. Ubuntu does not provide you a path to ALL the things you might want to do or configure, but instead it focuses on the most important core tasks and makes it straight-forward to do them.
SUSE/KDE try to give the user EVERYTHING they might ever want in the name of configurability, but they don't do it well. The 5 features I do want to configure drown in the sea of other useless junk that is also enabled or has some obscure default setting.
I find it far easier to start with an almost clean slate and add-in those five things myself instead of filtering out all the junk I don't need. Even if that means I have to install gnome-do myself, it ensures that I get exactly what I want.
Keep in mind, this is a list of things which I believe to be viable alternatives, not necessarily good ones, and not necessarily better. Just things you might not have known about, or considered.
Mostly, just in case people read TFA, try one of his suggestions, and find themselves thinking "this sucks!" Well, Linux is all about choice -- and here is some choice:
Vanilla SSH is good, but...
To replace SecureCRT I chose SSH Menu along with the stock OpenSSH client. This keeps track of my connections, allowing me to avoid having to memorize IP addresses of jump off boxes, and it also remembers my window sizes.
For the IP addresses, I would suggest a host file and possibly some aliases, if you have a few you connect to often enough to have, for example, 'ssh root@chromium' is too long, so you type something like shcr instead. (I don't actually do that (I type too fast to care), but I've seen others do it.)
Or just use a smarter terminal -- one which can remember window sizes and commands to run as part of a "session".
Also, there's no SCP or SFTP feature that I can find comparable to SecureCRT. This isn't too much of a problem as I don't SCP that many files, but it's still annoying having to type in hostnames or IP addresses.
See above -- not ssh-specific. Any command you type frequently enough, you could just make a menu entry.
Or, if you're a GUI person, fish is nice, too -- just bookmark fish://user@host/wherever in Konqueror.
I'm using OpenOffice (OO) 2.4.1, and it works fine.
Good enough.
If it's not fine, alternatives to try are KOffice, or the GNOME office stuff (AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc). Google Docs, of course, works flawlessly in Firefox regardless of platform.
Ok, Microsoft is probably never going to port this application to Linux. So I used VirtualBox, a free alternative to VMWare, and installed XP.
Not a horrible solution, if you actually need Visio. But there are numerous alternatives that try to do the same thing. I usually go for something more automatic, like GraphViz (with dot).
Since I use Adblock, sometimes I have to use Opera when I want to see how a page is supposed to look.
Or Konqueror... Or you can turn off Adblock for a single page.
This is a sore spot. I work in an Exchange environment...
When I did, I just used Thunderbird with IMAP. These days, I'd use KMail/Kontact with IMAP. I guess it depends how much you need.
The problem is Evolution kind of sucks too
I'll suggest Kontact.
Another easy win here. Pidgin comes pre-installed.
Cool. If you need webcam support, there's Kopete, but it has its own weirdness. Pidgin likely Just Works.
Nothing big here, I just use Gnome-RDP.
Similarly, krdc is nice, mostly because it's a multi-backend client. Paste in a URI-like specification, and it'll do RDP, VNC, whatever.
Ubuntu comes with a stock PDF reader pre-installed, and it works. However it's pretty plain, and at one point I changed it to view two pages at once and since haven't figured out how to put it back.
KPDF was good. Okular is excellent. And for the record, to change the above in Okular is view->view mode.
So I downloaded the Adobe Linux client and it works great.
apt-get install acroread. Yep, works great. I only use it when I have to, though.
So I use PasswordSafe. Unfortunately the Linux version sucks.
There's got to be something else out there. I know that, at one point, I was using Google Browser Sync -- maybe there's a service like that, still?
I just switched over to Amarok though, and I love it - it has smart playlists, and even a pause button! I kept Rythymb
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The last suse installation I tried installed three web browsers by default and gave them their own submenu. For most people that is too much choice.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
On ubuntu you really don't need an ftp or sftp client because gnome applications already speak those networking protocols.
Just open up nautilus, and give the networking path instead of the file system path. sftp://my_username@myserver.com/my/path
Using gedit or other gnome programs you can even open up the files remotely without manually copying them to the local disk.
This also makes setting up an smb server unnecessary since as long as you have ssh access you can access the whole remote filesystem through nautilus.
I've never heard of anyone ever getting it to work with a real world program.
The problem is that different linux distros are *not* binary compatible with each other. Some of the core libraries like glibc are compatible, but most binaries link a ton of other stuff. You might as well try installing windows programs or osx programs.
Alien cannot fix ABI incompatibilities.
>What to do when a developer distributes a .deb, or the other way around?
>.rpm but not a
Install from source.
On the other hand proprietary developers have a different system for installing their software. They use a minimal set of shared libraries like glibc and the x libraries that don't change their ABI often, then they statically compile everything else.
They also typically provide a shell script based installer instead of an rpm. Those that provide rpm's typically also provide a fairly generic deb.
It's a bitch getting inter distro compatible binaries on linux, so unless the developer put the initial work in, don't expect to be able to force it to run on your distro.
and I've had good luck with it in thunderbird.
However, I don't think there's linux program that handles exchange calendaring well. There's a plugin for thunderbird, but it doesn't work very well.
My advice is to use outlook web access for calendaring if you don't have a windows box on hand... although honestly I just keep my corporate laptop with winxp next to my linux workstation for when I need the calendar.
If you get sick of switching back and forth between windows, a good option is to use rdesktop:
http://www.rdesktop.org/
to log into your windows machine and keep a window open with outlook. Alternatively, there's always vmware, although it's a bit pricey and sucks up ram.
I bounced around from distro to distro for a while, too. Used Mandrake for a while because Red Hat was terrible, Debian's installation confused me (this was quite a while ago, mind you) and wanted some sort of "floppy calibration" test thing that I still don't understand (and haven't seen since) before it would happily install.
Switched to Debian when Mandrake began to suck (after version 8) and Debian had gotten mildly more user-friendly.
Then Gentoo, after a brief but annoying flirtation with Fedora and Suse. Gentoo was a gigantic pain in the ass, but it was still less of a pain in the ass than the other distros I'd used. That's how bad the others were.
I tried Ubuntu in its second release, and knew that they were on to something, but it wasn't quite all there yet. Their third release won me over and I haven't looked back. It is different from its most similar competitors (Red Hat/Fedora and Suse)--specifically, it's less fucked up under the hood and has much more user-friendly admin tools, which integrate well with the rest of the UI rather than looking like something tacked on. Ubuntu has a tendency toward sensible defaults that I believe it inherits from Debian, but doesn't stop you from doing other things. Its stock set of programs makes more sense than any other I've seen.
Its Debian roots serve it well, but I never have to worry about downloading the source for a program and then needing to use a non-official repository or compile a newer GTK (or some other library) to compile it because the one I've got is so ancient, as can occasionally happen even in testing and unstable Debian (or at least it used to be a problem--I haven't used Debian at all in nearly two years, admittedly). It keeps me up-to-date but still feels more-or-less like Debian beneath the surface.
It's easy enough for a n00b but flexible and powerful enough for power-users and Linux geeks (at least, those of us who have had our share of mucking around in /etc to achieve basic functionality and have no desire to continue doing that). None of the other "user friendly" distros have impressed me so much.
No, just neither an Apple or Linux fanboy. Most likely chants 'There is but one OS and Richmond is its vendor' at any and all board meetings.
Hey, nobody ever got fired for specifying Microsoft.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
But the curses are piling up...
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
It seems like I'm seeing a new article about a Windows guy trying Linux every couple days or so. I don't find this guy's article particularly stimulating, but I like the message. Windows guys are liking Linux enough to spread the word any way they can. Here's another Windows IT guy blogging as he tries Linux. I'm interested to see his final verdict: Vista Vitals
I've got some special insight into this argument since I've been on both sides of it. ...an engineer. (Note what I'm doing with Capitalization here). Specifically, I was a stationary engineer and a member of the International Union of Operating engineers. I served a four year apprenticeship in order to be a journeyman stationary engineer. There can be a certain amount of "hell" associated with that process too (that most academics would underestimate).
I've been through all of the hell that you described above and gotten my BS in Mechanical Engineering from an accredited university. I've now worked as a Civil Engineer for several years, and have recently taken the PE exam. (I'll be retaking it soon. My score was one point too low).
Before I got my degree, I was working my way through college part-time as
The title is traditionally applied in two different (and probably more) senses. The first, Engineer, is given to a range of professions requiring a high degree of mathematical, scientific, and a well-rounded academic education, that is (supposed to be) typical of at least a four-year college degree. The second sense, engineer, is to refer to members of a range of vocational trades that branched out of heavy equipment operations, (especially steam-powered equipment) in the nineteenth century. Both of these traditional uses of the term have well-established precedent.
Today the academic Engineers would like to restrict the use of the term to distinguish themselves from the vocational engineers. But the latter naturally object to the loss of the respected title. My take on this is that vocational side underestimates the expectations that the most recent use of the term Engineer evokes. I would continue to have considerable respect for current members of my former trade, if they were to use the titles of "technician" and "operator" instead. But I suspect that many of my current colleagues, i.e. Engineers, don't adequately appreciate the difficulties encountered in acquiring a skilled trade and don't have much respect such titles or vocations.
Last Friday I stumbled over a project that seems to fit that requirement perfectly.
I'll just cite the site's intro:
andLinux is a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows 2000 based systems (2000, XP, 2003, Vista; 32-bit versions only). This project was started for Dynamism for the GP2X community, but its userbase far exceeds its original design. andLinux is free and will remain so, but donations are greatly needed.
And some more: ;-)
You will get:
* a fully functional Linux system, however without the usual desktop (you've already got one from Windows)
* a second panel (e.g. at the top of your Windows desktop) or a second start menu (in the system tray next to the clock), from which you can start Linux applications
* Linux applications and Windows applications can be used simultaneously and you can cut and paste text between them
* apt / Synaptic to install further applications
You will NOT get:
* another desktop
* the bench of applications that usually ship with Linux distributions (you have to fetch whatever you want)
* trouble with further drivers
Limitations
* Security warning: It is recommended to use andLinux only on single-user-PCs or in a trustworthy environment because the communication with the X-Server and the launcher is not secured, i.e., every user who can login to Windows can access andLinux.
* andLinux is not suitable for high-performance realtime graphics such as required by most 3D games. Although some users managed to get openGL applications to work on recent hardware, you will most probably experience problems doing so.
* If you have a multi-core CPU, you will only be able to use one of these cores for andLinux (due to technological limitations, as all andLinux processes are encapsulated in one Windows process).
See http://www.andlinux.org/
I haven't tested it yet but I think I will install it shortly.
Cheers.
and indeed, mr AC, who are you? Everybody *is* Somebody....
billy pilgrim *has* become unstuck in time!
Actually his writeup hits a point I've been struggling with for a while and one that is making me reconsider Linux as my desktop OS.
Is there a diagram editor that works on Linux? I've tried Dia and it seems clunky and lacking. Is there anything out there with the functionality of Visio, but runs on Linux?
Well I have most of this going either by using Codeweavers crossover or linux tools:
The only thing i have not been able to convert over to linux is PeopleTools, which is getting looked at by the crossover guys atm. For now i have it running under Suns new implementation of VirtualBox which is running sweet as and has not crashed once ;) .
I do admit that it is a "little" more effort to get things up and running, but I enjoy learning. So as long as this reigns true I will keep using Ubuntu.
I'm glad I can bring this out now that you give me the chance.
A pseudonym like the ones that Slashdot gives us are an alter ego, a persona which we build our reputation upon (that's what karma points are for). Subscribers can see the WHOLE HISTORY of a user's comments, you can see how the user thinks, what bothers him/her, etc., and know him a lot. And yes, make one mistake and all that reputation goes down the drain (like mine did a few months ago).
So, no, a pseudonym is NOT equivalent to being anonymous. Without pseudonyms we couldn't communicate and exchange ideas.
So, when I speak, I speak for myself. And fellow users, even if they don't know my real identity, know who I am by what I write.
He didn't hear your mom complaining.