Scoot’s thoughts on all things technology, design, photography and life in general !
After a frustrating time during the snow when my hard disk in my thinkpad crashed big style I have successfully moved to an ubuntu build with a vmware for those windows based applications I need to use and demo. That week started with snow thus no access to the office, but with the beauty of spare technology I was able to swap the duff drive with the one from my original Macbook that is not being used being only 80GB 
With my Macbook Pro I connected back to the office and downloaded the VPN software, whilst downloading the standard build in VMware format and the Ubuntu Karmic Koala 64bit. Within a day I was back up running with the exception of some quirks with the vpn build needed for access to work, but this was only a minor issue as I could still connect via the vmware image.
It was interesting when I rang IBM support to get the old drive sorted on warranty. Basically they wouldn’t except a linux disk test error message stating exactly how many bad sectors I had, instead they insisted that I download a Dr PC window version tester to test the disk that only reported a vague disk error message. This proved a challenge as I had to borrow a windows PC to burn the bootable CD to test the disk, great fun, what if I didn’t have access to a window PC. When I rang back with the error code the agent was only interested that I had a disk error message to satisfy his requirements to send out a new disk. This turned up the following Tuesday so it was a good job I had that spare otherwise with the snow I would have to use the Macbook…
Lets hope this disk can last more than 8 months…….
Now had the new desktop up and running for a while and have used it lot more no issues found so far. I like the boot up of around 30-40 secs from pwr on to login including entering user and password. The Ubuntu 9.04 is working well and using 64bit desktop version rather than going for the server version.
Installed VMWare Server v2 and then copied some existing images across plus created a new image based on Oracle Enterprise Linux. This has worked well and the learning process has proceed with a few hiccups with the 11g database but all now sorted and good experience. Over the last week have learnt a hell of lot of stuff around the base product set and the potential pitfalls that you can encounter. This all ended with a customer presentation and workshop that was very successful. As a follow-on from that this week has been hectic as we are getting more and more enquiries.
I expect that June is going to be a very busy month and the start to an epic journey around EMEA or at least some of it working with customers and the local Oracle teams.
Spotted an excellent offer from ebuyer today that was a 1TB 3.5 7200rpm hard disk with 32MB cache for £60 so decided to get two to add to the desktop for backup and file server purposes.
Today was a bad Ubuntu day. I have been using Ubunut for about two weeks or so on my two work laptops and most stuff is fine as long as it is installed. At IBM some people have collaborated on various layers for Ubunutu to get the standard applications installed and running so I can do my day job without hinderance. In the main all of these work fine but as soon as I want to do something different I then start to run into trouble.
My current issue is I cannot get my Canon USB printer that is connected to a Airport Express to be recognised by Ubuntu. So you may say so what, this is not a normal configuration, but I have to disagree, often people find ways to improve their productivity by improvsing and using what is at hand to get the job done. I have used this setup for a couple of years at least without issue on three Windows XP and two Mac OSX devices, so now you may see why I am getting fustrated with the ubuntu setup. I am a techie and have been for 20 plus years, but as this is my day to day laptop and it is something straight forward that I am trying to do so this doesn’t give me confidence when asking others to try linux based desktops. All of the people I know that are using Linux are techies, there is the main problem. If we want to get this to the masses then we have to get rid of these userability issues. I am not giving up on my Ubuntu desktop I will continue to work at getting a usable system, but I will have a reliance on my windows partitions for the short to medium term and VMWare for other demo type scenarios. If I had a choice of OS then it would be MAC OSX everytime as it provides me with an end user ready UX, second choice is currently windows for ease of use, with ubuntu bring up the rear. I suspect that once I have Ubuntu running all the things I need then we should be moving it to second position.
I shall wait for my colleagues to hassle me, but I can ignore these as they are techies and often do not see it from the end user perspective.
It only seems like yesterday it was y2k, and we are stepping closer to the end of the decade. A mixed week so far, busy in some respect not in others. But as far as the rebuild of the laptop that has already progressed nicely.
I have managed to install a base WinXP partition and start to get the patches upto date plus some of the smaller applications. The Ubuntu partition was installed last night after a failed attempt with a duff CD. This morning installed the VPN clients and got the core/base IBM layers installed this did take too long. I then went and did the productivity based layer including Notes 8.5 and Sametime 8 this seem to take forever due to the network connection drip feeding the packets, I mean in today age and I managed to get a throughput rate between 19-64kbps which is poor, I should have dialed in it would have been quicker.
Had the partition completed by early afternoon and now need to put the extras on such as VMWare and a few other apps.
Nipped out for an hour to see Cameron’s first Xmas concert and this was good although it was chaos, children and parents everywhere, hey ho. The little one is asleep now and I don’t blame him, Ruth over for dinner tonight (ok takeaway) and Debbie & Roman over for lunch tomorrow.
So I thought as I have a load of admin type stuff to do today, plus a few calls I would try and multi task and start the rebuild of my laptop ready for the new year. So the first challenge was digging out my XP cd and created an updated version with SP3 included. Although the slipstreaming piece was straight forward I discovered that my burning software refused to recreate a bootable CD so had to hunt around for some trial software. After some digging I downloaded a trial of Nero 9 to see if this would achieve the desired goal.
Whilst that was going on I started the job of tidying my current disk drives so that I would be able to swap the 200GB D drive with the 100GB C drive and have a larger partition. The main reason for doing this was in prep to dual boot with Ubuntu client that I have been trying on my other laptop and seems to work well. I will have a dual boot so that some of the software I have will need to be run native on Windows for customer demos.
So waited an hour and still no serial number from Nero, so I decided a plan B was in order so I used my install of ultraISO to create an ISO from the original CD then replaced the contents with the SP3 version. I started the process of installing Win XP and all the associated application I seem to need to do my day job. The list was nearly two sides of an A4 sheet so lots to be done. I will need to visit an office shortly to complete some of the setup as I will need LAN speeds for some configurations and to test the internal wireless authentication.
Next step is dual boot with Ubuntu, this will be done very soon. Although a lot of my colleagues are hassling me for even reinstalling Windows natively on my drive and not using a VMWare image for my needs. My one arguement is that I have not road tested this TP with Ubuntu in real life scenarios such as a customer demo/presentation so once I have completed a couple successfully I will then move to a VM image for Windows. I am hoping by this time some one would have furnished my with a shiny new MacBook or MB Pro..
