Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

It’s been 7 weeks of using Ubuntu 7.04 (better known as Feisty Fawn) as my primary desktop. I figured it was time to give my final assessment. Well, it’s not final, but I’ve come to what I imagine will be a steady state for a while. I’m relatively happy, and, surprisingly enough, I don’t miss using the mac everyday.

Here are the good things:

• Even macs get weird sometimes, especially if they’ve been on for a long time. The only time I shut down this laptop is when I’m taking it somewhere, which is relatively rarely. So I regularly have it on for many days at a time, with no noticeable degradation in performance.
• I love apt-get/aptitude. 90% of the software I want to install I just install by saying “apt-get install name_of_package”. Anything that is a requirement gets installed along with it. It’s so incredibly easy. In general, installation and configuration of software has become much easier.
• Open Office works better on Linux than on the mac, as does thunderbird and firefox
• For a few things (mostly system/network tools) there are some incredibly awesome options, amazingly good for free (as in beer) software, and better than software you’d pay for. For some things, there are lots of relatively decent choices.
• I have no problem getting just about all of my work done using Ubuntu.
• My printer setup (Brother laser printer) was easier on Linux than on the mac

Here are the bad things:

• The games available on Linux leave much to be desired
• Getting proprietary codecs to play (MP3, WMA, etc.) can be a pain
• XWindows (x.org) can be annoying to configure if you go beyond the most simple
• KDE is a memory hog (I switched to xfce, and am thinking about other light window managers)
• There are some serious holes in available software
• Some things take a while to get set up - longer than on a mac.
• Getting some hardware configured can be painful.

Now the ugly:

• If you are used to integration between your email, calendar and addressbook, there is only one option (Novell Evolution) and it is not very good.
• If that integration, with the added integration of a PDA is very important to you, don’t even bother trying Linux on the desktop.
• Regressions are on the rise (regressions are things that used to work, but break in new versions.)

So, overall, I like it, and I’m sticking with it, with the exception of my addressbook and calendar. It was quite a shame to have to give that up, but it was either that, or make due with either not using a Palm, or modifying dramatically how I dealt with my PIM data. So I’m stuck where I don’t want to be (where lots of nonprofits are) with a data integration problem that I can’t solve right now, and likely won’t get solved for years. Evolution, apparently, is not under active development because Novell is focusing on Groupwise. The Mozilla Foundation supposedly has been working on an integrated email/calendar/contacts system, but they are spinning off Thunderbird, and Sunbird (the calendaring app) is coming along slowly. So an integrated app from Mozilla is years away, if it will happen at all (nevermind the palm part.)

I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10 coming out in October. I’m sure I’ll be upgrading.

And, to answer the question posed above, the answer is, for me, obviously, a definite yes. But it appears, from my experience and others, that question actually has to be framed not as “Is Linux ready for the desktop?”, but “Is Linux ready for your desktop?” And the answer to that question depends upon the unique combination of the type of work, your software and hardware needs, and your willingness to put up with certain things. (Although, one needs to be willing to put up with some things no matter what OS one picks - it just depends on what you want to put up with.)

Just today, I received in the mail some Sony Vaio Picturebook laptops, courtesy of Gavin’s regular potlatch program. My goal was to bring them to the Linux geek out at NTC, and have people play with Linux installs on them. But, I realized that I had somewhat of a challenge on my hands.

Linux is supposed to be easy to install and use. And, in most situations, it is. And, if I had a USB CD-ROM drive, it would be, since it seems from the BIOS of the Vaio’s that they can boot from USB external devices. But, the computers are networked, so it would seem - there must be some easy way, right?

Debian comes to the rescue. They have a site, with the URL: http://goodbye-microsoft.com, which is a link to a windows .exe file, which is a simple, sweet Debian installer. It works pretty well (at this moment, I’m now downloading and installing the base system.) The one snag I hit (not unusual) is that originally, I was using the wireless cards for networking, but the basic Debian system didn’t recognize them. So I switched to the very standard ethernet PC cards that Gavin so thoughtfully included, and bingo - everything works.

My next step, after installing the basic Debian system, is to switch the install to Ubuntu. That’s easier than it sounds. Changing one file (/etc/apt/sources.list) and running a few commands, should do the trick. We’ll see…

Anyway, if you’ll be at NTC, come by and see where I got to. The geekout will be on Thursday at 3:30.

Technorati Tags: 07NTC, nptech, linux

• For you Windows types, IE 7 is out, and they found a vulerability 24 hours after release.
• Also, for you Windows types, here is a plain english interpretation of the Windows Vista EULA (End User License Agreement.) How about this one: "You may not work around any technical limitations in the software." What else is it that us geeks do? You can’t play mpeg-4 videos except under extremely limited conditions, and if you upgrade your computer more than once, you’ll have to pay. So if you are a hardware geek, expect to pay MS every other time you get a new motherboard. And since they seem to upgrade their OS every 6 years or so … I have a suggestion. Get Ubuntu, and have done already. Notice, I didn’t say "get a mac". You could, and still be better off. Apple’s OS is, of course proprietary, and Apple’s EULA is a little less evil. And, you can run any windows software you want on it, at either native speed, or a bit slower in emulation. But you’d still have to buy Windows. So you’d still have the same problem. But if you really want to have done with stuff like this, get Ubuntu. It’s the best flavor of Linux out there right now in terms of ease of use. (Some think that Microsoft is abandoning power users.)
• A company going in the other direction: Eudora is going open source (no, they are not open sourcing old Eudora code, they are changing direction to use Mozilla Thunderbird as the underlying technology.)
• There is a new site, called "Campus Reader" which aggregates feeds from college news sources. I like it. A lot. Anyone for "Nonprofit Reader"?
• Yahoo and Microsoft have Google Envy. Is this news?

I’m trying Ubuntu Linux on an old compaq laptop I have (and brought with me to California.) It’s an old Compaq Armada (m300) that I bought used last year, and weighs about 2 pounds without the accessory bay. It was pretty cheap when I bought it, but it must have cost a fortune when it was new. I’ve installed regular Debian on it, plus a couple of versions of Fedora.

I’ve been hearing all sorts of good things about Ubuntu, and I figured it was time to try it out. Here’s my basic experience and review of it.

The most recent version of Ubuntu is 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). You can get it from their download page. They have regular ISOs, bittorrent files, and jigdo files. They’ve got some good mirrors, because the regular ISO download isn’t too slow.

I am intimately familiar with Debian, and Debian installs, but I’m going to write this as if I wasn’t - I think that would make it the most useful.

The first part of the install process (basic configuration, partitioning and base system install)  is very straightforward - there were few choices to make, the hardware was detected flawlessly, and the install went easily. I kinda went away after the first reboot, and was greeted with the login screen when I came back. No intervention was necessary. Easier install than Windows, I think.

A few things were a bit odd - for example there wasn’t a request for a root password - the default root password seems to be the same as the password for the single user account that was set up during install.

Gnome is the default desktop, and the only one installed by default - I’m a KDE fan. I switched my desktop environment in a way that I’m familiar with (install the kde packages, then change the default desktop manager in /etc/X11.)  Kubuntu, which is the sub-project to bring KDE to Ubuntu, seems really nice - and if I’d read the Kubuntu page first, I would have had an easier time switching to KDE.

The basic add/remove applications interface is nice, and the advanced panel has everything. The configuration editor is not really intuitive, but for those who don’t like the command line, it’s an improvement over basic CLI configuration.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu so far - the ease of install and configuration, matched with Debian’s ease of software update, etc. We’ll see how it works when I try to set up development environments (both Postgres/Perl and Ruby for Ruby on Rails) but I can’t imagine, given the Debian base, that I’ll run into trouble.

This is incredibly cool. I don’t know if it’s true, but I like it. A lot. If true: get an intel Mac, run Mac software, Windows software and UNIX software (via X windows) too. Wowie Zowie! Not only a geeks dream, but a very nice solution to all sorts of problems.

Via digg.