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.

Yesterday (April 1... I know it's technically April 3 now, but for me it's still Wednesday) was mildly momentous. Although the following graph hasn't quite caught up yet (UPDATE: now it has), the server that hosts TimTripcony.com broke its uptime record:



As the graph indicates, the red X's (which hover, on average, closer to 0) are from the server's stint as a Windows box; the blue represent its shiny new Linux identity. Since the conversion in early December, it's only had one reboot... and that's only because we had a brief power outage (bad Timmy, no UPS). Other than replacing the hard drive (with one that was actually older than the Windows drive, just hadn't ever been used), the hardware is the same - same motherboard, processor, NIC, RAM, etc.... it just stays up now. No babysitting: no weekly defrag, no chkdsk to try to keep it from tanking, no weird behavior if I ignore a security update on a server that's only externally accessible on ports that I'm securing via Domino anyway... it just stays up. Is Linux administration "harder" than Windows administration? Sure... if, like me, you don't originally come from a UNIX background, there's a lot that may seem counter-intuitive about it. You may spend a bit more time on "the Google" looking for the exact syntax of various commands. But I'd personally rather support something I rarely have to touch - even if that occasional interaction isn't quite as intuitive as its Windows equivalent - than have to constantly babysit a system just to keep it operational.

An announcement during Lotusphere that grabbed some media attention but didn't seem to even get mentioned at Lotusphere is that Red Hat is now offering a version of RHEL client and server that comes bundled with Notes and Domino, respectively. Our general manager is quoted in the BusinessWire press release, but it doesn't make it clear what (for us, at least) is so exciting about this: if you want to try this out but aren't comfortable flying solo on the initial setup, you call them and they send us. That's right: we'll come install the whole package for (and with) you to get you up and running. I'm a bit fuzzy on the exact details, to be honest, but if this sounds tempting to you, send an email to services@lotus911.com and we'll get you the whole scoop.

(cross-posted from TimTripcony.com)