What’s Up with Paul Oppenheim

For those of you just tuning into my blog and/or my life, I “switched” my computing platform in a strange way - from Mac OS X to Linux. I have learned a lot in the past 9 months, and I would like to share some of my surprising discoveries.

First, my situation. Previously, my one and only computer was a Powerbook G4. My whole life was on it. I backed it up to a firewire hard disk, and that was as far as my bits went. If I ever needed my data, i would just go in my bag and get my laptop. Life was simple.

Life got not so simple when the lower right hinge broke on the screen. The powerbook was 2 months out of the 3 year extended warranty, but it was my only link to the world. It became a pretty decent mac desktop, and it could now grow out of its 80 GB limitiation with an external hard drive.

The intrepid reader should already see Problem #1. Data doesn’t like to shrink! Now that my personal data could grow, it did. Rapidly. No replacement laptop could hope to be what this computer used to be, but I didn’t realize that yet. So I’ll have to keep a desktop around with all my data on it, but how will I get to my data on the laptop? The solution to problem #1 is a fileserver. That’s a whole other computer! And I’ll need to back that machine up somehow, so this is actually a very time and money consuming solution. I’m still working on it…

I thought about getting a PC laptop next, because there is far more selection. You can get a cheap high powered one. You can get an amazing subnotebook. You can get anything you want. The only problem with this is windows. I know it works for plenty of people out there, but to me it’s like a hot poker in the eye. Especially since I now know a lot about its internals from work, I dislike it and its design decisions even more. I wanted the cool hardware but no Microsoft Windows.

So I’d have to run Linux. I’ve been learning a lot about unix since my first day of college. I’d even installed linux a few times on my PC workstation that I had for college, so I knew what I was getting into. I also learned that if I’m not completely immersed in Linux, I will forget things and generally not be proficient.

Intrepid reader will see problem #2, aka the Cold Turkey Problem. So I’ll need to be immersed, and using it all the time. However, even if I solve problem #1 above (buy or implement a file server) and have any data I want any time I want, I may or may not have a program to open that data. No Adobe Photoshop or Graphic Converter? Use The Gimp - just, you know, set aside a few hours to learn it. Well, what about music programs like Reason? Errr… Take it like a man? The solution to this problem is to migrate slowly to open source programs - side-by-side with the proprietary ones on the Mac, then on Linux, and accept some data as just plain locked-in to proprietary apps. I’ll probably never be able to edit my Reason files as they are in Linux, ever. I’ll have to be content with the bounced audio, samples, and the Midi sequencer dumps.

Readers slightly knowledgeable about linux saw problem #3 from the top of this article - linux on laptops is painful. I suppose on could say desktop linux is generally painful, and laptop linux is an especially painful derivation. My previous experiences covered Redhat, Gentoo, and FreeBSD, but this time I went for the Purist’s Choice, Debian. If you know much about Debian, you probably know where this is going. Debian has three releases, stable, testing, and unstable. Stable is great, if you don’t mind mostly out-of-date software. This was a bit of a problem with a newer laptop with newer hardware. Afterwards I went right to unstable, which is great if you are immensely knowledgeable about configuring linux, and enjoy it as a hobby in its own right. Being a relatively ignorant person, I went ahead with it anyway. I struggled to get the video working at full resolution, make the trackpad stop tap-clicking, get the wireless working, get the wireless working with WEP, and to get the wireless working with WPA. I never got 3D acceleration, the media buttons working, automatic wireless network association, suspend-to-ram, etc….

Then I started hearing a lot about Ubuntu. Ubuntu 6.06 had just been released, and it was getting rave reviews. It was based on Debian, so my struggles before transferred into useful knowledge. Ubuntu handled all my laptop hardware correctly out-of-the-box, even suspend and the media buttons. So, the solution for problem #3 is Ubuntu, combined with waiting long enough for your hardware to be supported.

That’s most of it. The file server is really killing me, and I still have quite a bit of hardware to buy, notably enough hard drives to run in a RAID, and enough hard drives to back up that RAID. I’m not a rich man, so that’s most of the issue. The other issue is that I’m not so good with sysadminning yet. I want to have my files available on the LAN, securely over the WAN, and selectively replicated locally for when i’m disconnected. I’m already using ssh and svn for distributed Firefox and Thunderbird settings (some snafus, but really cool). I’m trying to use rsync for the replication, but it likes to think it needs to replace all files. I still need some time with it. I have Apache httpd and WebDAV serving up a share locally which I can mount as a drive in the filesystem in Linux and Mac OS X. I still don’t have SSL or a decent authentication scheme set up in apache tho. I’ve recently been given the suggestion of running OpenSWAN to VPN into on the server, and just using Samba, but I’m not too convinced of the WAN performance of that - I’ve tried using work Samba shares over their VPN to here… ugh, not ideal. However, nothing is stopping me from doing both!

One of the biggest app holes right now is Mac OS X Address Book / iCal / iSync (and all the aps that use the AB and Cal APIs). Man. People think iTunes has you in a headlock, just wait until you depend on iSync to get data onto your phone. Everything works together, seamlessly. There is nothing even close to this kind of functionality that I’ve seen on Linux. Other problem apps include music apps, as mentioned. I’ve found replacements, but haven’t really had the time to learn them.

Anyway, that’s it so far. As the title suggests, my next laptop (which needs to be sooner than later) will likely be a Mac. I’m all for open source and freedom, and will probably now put linux on it, but I need a few years to really migrate every single thing I do to an open-source app. Once that’s done, it’s just a question of how I like my OS configured. That’s hard enough, learning all these apps at the same time (and learning server administration!) is too much.

Suggestions? Am I as ignorant as I think I am? Let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading all the way through!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 12:37 am and is filed under Freedom, Linux, Nerd, Ubuntu, Unix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.