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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."
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 ??
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.
Speak for yourself. I just learned that someone's apparently still listening to The Prodigy.
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?
There are a few reasons I don't use Linux on my main box right now, and this hits the biggest of them.
Anyone who has ever tried to install a program not in the repository will know what a pain it can be. Getting stuck in dependency hell is still a very real problem, and while repositories help they are no substitute to fixing the problem.
In Windows, if you get an installer you have a reasonable expectation of being able to run it. Sometimes you hit dependencies, but not often, and they're generally the same for most programs.
Another big thing is having different package managers. What to do when a developer distributes a .rpm but not a .deb, or the other way around?
And I won't even start bitching about the 3D Graphics support...
Still, Windows isn't perfect, and Linux is far better in many ways. Having a software repository is awesome, and saves a lot of time searching for programs. However, until these problems are addressed, many developers will continue to develop only for Windows.
(I do use Linux on a regular basis, and find it does an awesome job for many things. Just not everything)
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!
Please remember one thing, Linux is not trying to be Windows.
I wish people would stop trying to lead and or label it that way.
Why did he not replace Visio with Dia?
Because he was running late for his appointment at the hairdresser
...a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore ~H2G2
Use Alien.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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'
Statically link your binaries or create a startup script to include the necessary (and included) libraries. It's done all the time. Lots of proprietary software that's distributed on Linux is packaged this way. It's no different, really, than OS X's disk image method.
Do you even understand the system you denigrate?
Put identity in the browser.
There are a few reason I don't use Windows on my main box right now, and this hits the biggest of them.
Anyone who has ever tried to install a program in windows knows how much of a pain it can be. They don't have a centralized repository for you to download the package.
On Linux, if you get an installation CD you have a reasonable expectation of connecting to he repository for that distro and getting a wealth of software available from the click of a button. Sometimes you find a package that isn't in the repo, but not often, and they'll generally install with a './configure && make && make install'
Another big difference is the way libraries are linked. What do you do if one vendor ships *.dll's under Program Files and another vendor ships the a different version of the same libraries under their subdirectory. Then you have two programs shipping the same code with double the memory. It's no wonder downloads of windows installers take so long.
And I won't even start bitching about installation wizzards...
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.
Or, compile yourself and install via checkinstall. I'd think if you were halfways aware of how to administrate a Linux system, you already know how to compile a tarball. Checkinstall builds the package, .deb or .rpm, and installs it for you. Then, you can add the package to your local repository.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
...
Anyone who has ever tried to install a program not in the repository will know what a pain it can be. Getting stuck in dependency hell is still a very real problem, and while repositories help they are no substitute to fixing the problem.
In Windows, if you get an installer you have a reasonable expectation of being able to run it. Sometimes you hit dependencies, but not often, and they're generally the same for most programs.
...
Instead, what you get with Windows is programs
a) forcing their way into unnecessarily running at startup.
b) forcing their way as the default for any file types they handle.
c) contacting the internet for who knows what purpose.
d) interfering with other installed programs, including the O/S itself.
e) ".dll Hell" I've had far more problems with this than "dependency hell". In fact, I've never suffered from "dependency hell" in 5 years of using Linux as my primary O/S.
f) DRM
Not to mention that Windows itself can affect all the above issues whenever you update.
But the curses are piling up...
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
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.