Yellow is the New Blog

As you may have noticed, I've recently become quite the Linux fanboy. Well, today I took it a step further. Yesterday my Dell Inspiron (which I'm using to post this) was running Windows XP with Ubuntu 7.10 running as a VMware virtual machine... today it's the opposite. Of the five computers in our apartment, the ratio is now 3 Linux (1 Ubuntu, 1 OpenSUSE, 1 Xandros) to 2 Windows... and one of those two isn't even mine; the other is Laura's Inspiron, and she hinted today that she might switch to Ubuntu soon too, since she uses exactly two programs: Firefox and OpenOffice - and she knows that both just come pre-installed with Ubuntu. Scratch that; I just remembered that she recently installed a third program: Aptana (which on Linux you don't install, you just unzip to a folder of your choosing, much like Eclipse on Windows). She's dabbling in PHP and had asked which IDE I would recommend. In short, we may soon be a Linux-only household; to the owner of the Latitude, don't worry... I'm leaving Windows alone on that machine.

Unlike on OpenSUSE, installing VMware on Ubuntu was a breeze:

apt-get install vmware-server

Only caveat: although it's free, you still need a valid serial number, and apt won't configure the package installation until you've entered one. Once installed, I spun up a new virtual machine (pointing it to an ISO of my XP CD), and in less than an hour had Notes reinstalled, complete with a data folder overwritten from the backup I'd saved to our NAS before converting. So Notes looks and behaves precisely as it did before. I decided to install Office 2003 because I loathe 2007. Nothing else... nice clean registry, so Windows is actually far snappier running as a VM than it used to be with all of the extra clutter.

On top of the base Ubuntu distro, I've added Skype, Eclipse, Aptana, and of course, Notes 8.0.1. When I tried to install it, the wizard window popped up, but it was just an empty panel. Mayhap I just didn't wait long enough, but after about five minutes, I killed it and just opted for the silent approach:

./setup.sh -silent -V licenseAccepted="true"

This installed Notes with Sametime, but without Symphony or the composite app editor. I'm actually not using Sametime at the moment; although it doesn't have all the fancies of Sametime 8, I actually prefer Pidgin (which is also pre-installed in Ubuntu) because it bundles all of my IM accounts (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, MySpaceIM, and Sametime) into a single interface.

By the way, Jens Bruntt posted a great article last week on how he installed Notes on Ubuntu. The fix he outlined for the embedded browser isn't working for me yet (for instance, xulrunner didn't install in /opt, and including a reference to /usr/lib/xulrunner doesn't seem to fix the problem), but to be honest, I don't use the embedded browser much anyway. So far, the only thing I miss is iTunes, but between gtkpod and the Amazon MP3 Downloader, I'm pretty much covered on that front as well.

UPDATE: Designer works flawlessly in wine. My Windows VM is now sleeping peacefully, doubtless dreaming of a day when I'll come crawling back, telling it I can't live without it. Don't feel bad, Windows... it's not you, it's me.