Test Again

And again

Another new

new one 2

Test Post

This is for testing

Here it comes to save the day...

...thank goodness mighty mouse is on the way! I got the MightyMouse working like totally. Side scrolling, squeezing, everything. It took a whole afternoon that I should have ctually been working, but I think it was worth it.

The trick is to use the evdev drivers. These were already installed (I think - I've done a lot of fiddling here). Again, for thsoe that want to know, here is the important bit of xorg.conf

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "MightyMouse"
Driver "evdev"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Buttons" "8"
Option "Dev Name" "Mitsumi Electric Apple Optical USB Mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event1"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "7 6 4 5"
Option "HWHEELRelativeAxisButtons" "7 6"
EndSection

The only bit that yoou might need to change is the Device option. To find that out, run cat /proc/bus/input/devices at look for the output that looks like this:

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=05ac Product=0304 Version=0110
N: Name="Mitsumi Electric Apple Optical USB Mouse"
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:1a.0-2.1/input0
S: Sysfs=/class/input/input4
H: Handlers=mouse1 ts1 event1
B: EV=100007
B: KEY=f0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=143

The bit that says event1 means that we want event1 in our option.

The other thing was that the z-axis mapping was the wrong way round, so I used the X mouse debugger to find the right order as above. All is now good in the world.

To prove I am more l33t than yous, I mapped squeezing to cube rotation in Zompiz. This is super cool because you literally pick up the screen and swing it around. To do this, I set initiate_button to Button8 in gconf under /apps/compiz/plugins/rotate/allscreens.

The Plunge

So, the machine has arrived. It's a Dell Dimension with an Nvidia graphics card in it - I gather this makes life easier. Twin monitors, which is super cool, but I bet it causes some grief somewhere. To make life super ard, I'm sticking with my mac keyboard and MightyMouse. Why? Apart from a masochistic streak, I am just used to the layout of the mac keyboard, which is very different to PCs in the UK - the " is in a much more sensible place. The mighty mouse is just too cool not to use ;)

The Installation
I got the Feisty Beta CD and booted up with it in the drive. Super easy! Within a minute, I'm looking at Ubuntu. The resolution isn't right and it hasn't picke dup my second monitor, but pretty good so far. Installation was a doddle. And then a reboot. Sweet.

What Ain't Quite Right
Quelle surprise? The dual monitors aren't picked up. But everything else seems quite good. The mouse essentially works. The up down scroller even works. I did not expect that. Firefox fires up and connected to the interweb straight away.

The restricted driver manager worked a charm. Added my graphics card, and I can feel the difference in windowing performance, so direct rendering is working.

So a bit of googling and I'm ready to edit my xorg.conf. I didn't intend to do this kind of thing, but I doubt I'll be able to get 2 monitors working without it. Just for the curious, here's the important bits from my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce 7300 LE"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "metamodes" "CRT-0: 1280x1024 +0+0, CRT-1: 1440x900 +1280+124; CRT-0: 880x704 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 800x600 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 640x480 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL; CRT-0: 1280x1024_75 +0+0, CRT-1: NULL"
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "True"
Option "RenderAccel" "True"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1280x1024" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

The twinview stuff is what made bth monitors work. Restarted X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace), and all worked fine.

Pushing The Envelope
Ever reckless at heart, I thought that the first thing I'd waste my time with was Beryl. I've always wanted wobbly windows and burnign fire :) Actually, the cube thing seems pretty useful. Beryl install soooo easily. And it ran ok, for about a minute, then froze :( After a few tries at this and googling for reasonable reasons and trying the results, I decided that it's probably TwinView that doesn't like being pushed as much as Beryl pushes it.

The answer to this, surprisingly was Compiz. Compiz installed and worked like a charm. It's nowhere near as flash as Beryl out of the box, but the cube works and that's enough for me.

I 'll post again when I've got everything just how I want it and I've decided the on the applications that I like/dislike.

Applications

The biggest problems I will have in this move are going to be in finding applications to replace those I use every day:







Eclipse:
My everyday Java development is done using eclipse. Somehow, I expect the replacement for this will be .... Eclipse! But it will be interesting to se ehow easy Java 6 is to set up on Ubuntu and how easy Eclipse is to get running.







Mail:
Apple's mail will be a tough act to follow. In general, it's really quite quick. It filters junk well. It works super fast with IMAP, integrates with the Address Book, renders HTML well. The list goes on. To replace this, I am probably looking at either Evolution or Thunderbird. Although back in my uni days, I used pine - if I can think of some really good reason, maybe the super duper speed of this might appeal....maybe?








Safari:
At the moment, safari is my browser of choice, but I do have a tendency to flick between Firefox, Safari, Opera and even Flock. I've been using Safari, because it seems like the fastest on the mac. I don't think Safari has anything over Firefox generally. I may try and use Flock, because I'd like to be a bit more web 2.0-ish!








iTerm:
My work does involve a fair bit os SSH-ing, so I need a good terminal, and iTerm is absolutely excellent. It has a great bookmark feature, with tabs, so I have more SSH servers seet up with short cut keys to open them in tabs. It has been a while since I saw a Linux terminal (XTerm, probably). I assume (hope) they have improved.








Address Book:
Like Apple's Mail, the Address Book as amazing. It's integrated into every application that could want to use it and it is synchronized between my work and home Macs (via .mac). I love the way that contacts come up in searches with Spotlight and Quicksilver. It even works with my Windows Mobile phone (via Missing Sync from Markspace). I have no idea how to replace this in Linux.







iTunes:
I own an iPod, so iTunes is my obvious choice as music player. If I can find a way to run iTunes in Linux, that would be great. Otherwise, I may just find myself using my iPod instead :( Using another music player doesn't seem that appealing, because my iPod picks up TV that I record at home automagically







Cyberduck:
I only recently discovered how useful this program is for SCP file sharing. I had always used the command line and SCP to move files around, but this app is great. I assume there is something similar for Linux these days.








Newsfire:
I got to get me my daily RSS fix. Anyone that's used Newsfire will tell you how cool it is. I just sit there hitting 'space' and I can troll through hundreds of of totally unmissable, essential news from Digg and Reddit. I really hope there's a good RSS reader for Linux. I'll start off trying Flock, but as I remember, while it's pretty, the RSS reader built in isn't for the real news junky.






iChat:
I probably shouldn't be using iChat, but there you go. With the Chax plugin, I can have iChat be quite subtle - tabbed chats and disappearing when it's not active. I doubt Gaim does quit the same things, but I don't know what else is available, really.














Quicksilver:
The most useful thing in the world, ever. Having ctrl-ctrl mapped to quicksilver means I hardly ever hunt around for anything - contaxts, documents, songs, applications. What are the chances that someone has done this for Linux? Slim to none?

What's Going On?

Having spent the last 6 years using a Mac at work, I am going to make the leap to Linux, full-time. I thought it might be therapeutic for me, and maybe informational for others if I documented this switch for future posterity. But first: a little background, I think.

I am not completely new to Linux or UNIX in general. At work, we use Linux and Solaris servers, and I had to set these up and I administer them when needed. I have never, however, tried to live with Linux as my general use desktop. It has always seemed too flimsy, and I thought that I would probably spend more time ironing out niggles than I would on actually working.

How did I come to this momentous decision? Well, the PowerMac G5 I use is about 4 years old, so it's gotten a bit long in the tooth. A new Mac Pro would be extremely tempting, but there was just no way to justify the cost. The decision was: get a PC or stick with the old G5. I must confess that has been a long time (about6 years) since I had to use Windows in anger, but most of my co-workers are Windows users, and it makes me cringe whenever I have to touch it. This isn't a Microsoft rant, but there is so much wrong with Windows that I was very very reluctant to switch. Besides, *NIX is now how I think, so going back to backslashes, C: and the dreaded Registry would be a real pain. So, what with all the recent Interweb attention on Ubuntu lately, I decided I would get a PC, try and run Ubuntu, and if that didn't work out, I'd swallow my pride and put Windows on it.

So this is what this blog will be about. The switch from MacOS X to Ubuntu. Wish me luck!