Transitioning Away from Windows Toward Ubuntu: The Next Step

In September 2008, I reached a point of relative stasis in the development of my computer setup.  I was using two computers, each with its own monitor, but with a common mouse and keyboard via KVM switch.  Both computers were dual-boot setups, so that I could have gone into Windows or Ubuntu on either one; but I tended to just use one or the other.  Specifically, on one computer, I installed Ubuntu and then used VMware Workstation to run Windows XP in virtual machines (VMs).  On the other computer, I was almost always running Windows XP, rarely going into Ubuntu.

I had assumed, there at the end of summer 2008, that I would be revisiting this layout in summer 2009.  Generally, that didn't happen.  Instead, two years passed.  At this point in 2010, however, I found that there had been some developments, such that this system could evolve.

One development was that, sometime in the intervening two years, I set up a third desktop computer.  It was mostly a collection of hand-me-down parts, but it ran Windows XP well enough.  If I really needed to do something in XP, I probably could do it there.  Moreover, I had acquired a laptop, for a bargain price of around $350 -- plus another $250 or so that I didn't entirely expect to spend, when I went to the store, for an extended warranty, laptop sleeve, screen protector, wireless mouse, etc.  Such a deal!  Anyway, neither the laptop nor the bucket-shop computer were anything to write home about, but they would serve in a pinch.

Another development was that I had run into several systems problems on the primary Windows XP machine.  It still ran stably, but I was getting occasional flaky problems.  Probably there would have been a list of them, if I had taken a minute to list the ways in which the machine was not performing up to snuff.

Probably the most worrisome such problem was that I had reached a dead-end in my efforts to install Windows updates on that primary machine.  It just wouldn't install them.  I had revisited the problem repeatedly.  At this point, it would probably have been more effective to just reinstall WinXP from scratch on that machine.

That update situation had been persisting for a while.  It hadn't bothered me much.  Recently, though, something else had happened.  I had somehow started using McAfee antivirus software, and I had just discovered that McAfee had been piling up gigabytes of stuff in .bup files.  I was concerned that this feat would have been possible only by mixing in data files; therefore, I had begun an effort to compare against an old backup and figure out what, if anything, might have gone missing over the past several months or longer.  So that was the end of McAfee, for me, but it was also a wake-up call to take computer security more seriously.  That meant keeping updates installed, but perhaps it also meant it was time to continue my migration away from Windows.

For such reasons, I thought it might be time to consider running both of my primary computers under the same kind of Ubuntu - VMware - WinXP VM setup.  If I needed XP, I could still drop back into the dual-boot, or just use that hand-me-down computer.  If I needed Vista or Windows 7, I could use the laptop, which was presently running the one but which apparently qualified for a free upgrade to the other.

In addition to those developments on the Windows side, things had also been happening on the Ubuntu side of the equation.  First, the good things.  Ubuntu was looking good and running well.  I had learned a bit more about Wine.  Generally, I was continuing to become more familiar and comfortable with the world beyond Windows.  I still had occasional issues with VMware, but generally nothing lethal.  As an additional consideration, Oracle had created the impression that it might be positioning VirtualBox to compete effectively with VMware.  Even without that, it was still nice that I could leave a WinXP VM running in Ubuntu for a week without needing to reboot it, while that would just never work on the native WinXP machine.

At the same time, after these several years of experimenting with Ubuntu, I had to agree with someone who had said that Linux distributions still tended to be terribly unpolished in comparison with Windows.  Somewhat contrary to my expectations, I was not finding many instances in which Ubuntu programs were delivering superior functionality and reliability.  For instance, I had bought a copy of Beyond Compare, a file synchronization program.  (I subsequently realized that I probably could have gotten by with a freeware alternative, but whatever.)  There were Windows and Linux versions of Beyond Compare.  The Linux version did not seem to be very actively developed, and it was having problems that I wasn't having in the Windows version.  The same was true elsewhere.  I was still using IrfanView, which did not yet have a Linux version; I was still using CoolEdit 2000, because it had features that Audacity did not provide.  Generally, I was finding that Ubuntu was great as an operating system; I was finding it useful as an underlying layer, to handle tasks that WinXP couldn't handle (e.g., delete files that WinXP couldn't delete); I found that WinXP running in a VM on Ubuntu was more stable (although slower) than a native WinXP installation.  But at the point of application, for my purposes, Ubuntu wasn't a serious competitor against Windows XP.  And I was increasingly unwilling to invest the time to learn how to do everything in two or more different ways.

My conclusion, at this point, was that the best of both worlds called for running Windows XP within virtual machines (in VMware or otherwise) on an Ubuntu operating system base, on an Ubuntu/XP dual-boot computer.  I had already worked through many of the issues in this sort of setup, and could therefore hope to be efficient and preserve multiple troubleshooting options without too much of a time investment.  If Windows 7, Ubuntu, or some other operating system (OS) began to display capabilities that I badly needed, I would hopefully be able to incorporate those OSs into my setup, one computer at a time, without too much disruption overall.

Tweaking Ubuntu 10.04

I had upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).  Now I wanted to make some adjustments.  For this purpose, I would be drawing upon the first and second lists of adjustments I had made when I had installed 9.10.

The first of those other things was to install a PAE-enabled 10.04 kernel, so that I would have access to all of my system's RAM.  I also found that VMware Workstation 7.0 was requiring me to enter my serial number.  I had not entered it after installing it on 9.10; I had just been using the trial serial number.  Now, unfortunately, Workstation was not cooperating:  it was saying "Unknown error entering serial number."  The solution to this problem was to run Workstation as root (i.e., type "sudo vmware" at the Terminal prompt) and enter the serial number there.

Since I was doing an upgrade of a previous installation, I did not have to reinstall packages, but I did have a problem with Software Sources.  I have described that one in a separate post.  (Even if I had needed to reinstall packages, the "installed-software" trick described in the lists of adjustments (above) would have made short work of it.)  On my laptop, I was doing the same upgrade, and there I made some problems for myself when I had to interrupt the upgrade.  Here on the desktop, the next task was (as described in separate posts) to try to get the printing and scanning features of my Brother MFC-7340 printer working from within Ubuntu.  After doing that, I tackled a problem that I had wanted to solve for years:  how to import the list of AutoCorrect entries that I had created in Microsoft Word into OpenOffice.org Writer, running on Ubuntu.  That took some time, but then I was able to get back to the project of working through those notes from previous installations.

The upgrade from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 had preserved much of the configuration I had already set up.  So as I worked through the Ubuntu tweaking steps described in one of my previous posts, I had to deal with only a fraction of the issues addressed there.  One was to prevent icons for mounted drives from appearing on the desktop.  That called for Terminal:  “gconf-editor” > /apps/nautilus/desktop > unclick volumes_visible.  But it was already unclicked, and yet I did have icons for mounted drives visible on the desktop.  I went into Applications > System Tools > Ubuntu Tweak > Desktop Icon Settings and clicked Show desktop icons and left everything else unchecked, but this made no difference.  I tried again, this time using “sudo gconf-editor.”  Ah, yes.  The volumes_visible box was checked for root.  Unchecking it removed the icons from the desktop.

I had not noticed, but somewhere along the line, I had evidently installed nautilus-open-terminal via Synaptic, or possibly it came installed by default.  As its name suggested, this tool added a right-click (context menu) option in Nautilus, "Open in Terminal."  Unlike Windows Explorer, this option was only available for folders in the file listing in Nautilus -- in the right pane, that is, not in the left pane that would typically show the folder tree.  In that left pane, this and other options were absent.

Had another little problem.  During the upgrade to 10.04, the Firefox icon changed, on the left-side (formerly top) panel, to a red do-not-enter or not-allowed kind of icon; and in Applications > Internet, it changed to a grey question-mark box.  I fixed this by going to the panel, right-clicking on Applications > Edit Menus > Internet > Firefox > Properties, clicking on the icon, and selecting /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox.png.  Speaking of Firefox, I wanted Ubuntu to open Firefox and Google Chrome on startup.  I wanted to add these to a script that would run at startup, since I suspected that I would be coming up with other things that I wanted to have happen at startup too.  It seemed pretty technical – beyond my current ability, anyway – but it looked like I might be able to just write a script and put it into /etc./init.d.  I typed “sudo gedit” and then created a file called /etc./init.d/a_startup_script.sh.  I put, into it, the line that I got from e.g., right-clicking on Applications and choosing Edit Menus > Applications > Internet > Firefox > Properties:  “firefox %u.”  I saved it and typed “chmod +x /etc./init.d/a_startup_script.sh.”  Then I rebooted.  This achieved nothing.  So creating a general-purpose startup script remained a goal for the future.

I also went down Gizmo’s Freeware list of tweaks.  I had already done most of the ones I wanted, but there were a few others.  One was to install Windows TrueType fonts in Ubuntu.  I decided to extend their advice somewhat.  I took a look at System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts.  I could see that a lot of Windows fonts were not present on the list there.  So in Windows XP, I went to C:\Windows\Fonts.  I selected and copied everything to another, temporary folder called UbuFonts.  In UbuFonts, I sorted by file type and deleted the ones that were not TTF files.  Back in Ubuntu, I typed “sudo nautilus” and went to /usr/share/fonts/truetype.  It already had a folder called msttcorefonts, but with only a fraction of the fonts that I had just copied from C:\Windows\Fonts to UbuFonts, and the font files there seemed older and smaller.  I made a backup copy of the msttcorefonts folder and then copied everything from UbuFonts into /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts.  Now System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts had a much wider selection.  I changed the fonts to Tahoma 10 and the monospace to Courier 10.  Tahoma allowed me to see more information on each line onscreen.

Another tweak from Gizmo called for some playing around with Compiz.  This was a bad idea, as described in a separate post.  Another tweak of interest was to clean up the GRUB boot menu.  I typed “uname -r” and saw that I was using the 2.6.32-22-generic-pae kernel.  In Synaptic, I searched for linux-image, clicked at the top of the left-hand column to sort by those that were installed, and marked for removal all numbered items other than that kernel.  In this case, that included just two items:  linux-image-2.6.31-21-generic-pae and linux-image-2.6.32-22.generic (i.e., not pae).  I did another search for linux-headers and marked all non-2.6.32-22-generic-pae items there too.  In this case, trying to remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22 threatened to remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22-generic-pae as well; but I wanted to keep that, so I didn’t remove linux-headers-2.6.32-22.  On restart, I saw that GRUB now listed just the 2.6.32-22-generic-pae kernel and its recovery mode, along with memtest and Windows XP (it was a dual-boot machine).  I went back into Ubuntu without a problem.  I did later have a VMware problem that might have been related to this, though.

Gizmo also pointed me toward a number of recommended freeware apps.  These were for the KDE (not GNOME) desktop.  I thought it might be time to try KDE, if only to check out these programs.  One was the Wally wallpaper changer, which I installed through Synaptic.  Getting Wally (and the whole KDE desktop) involved a total of 91 files.  Other interesting pieces of Gizmo-recommended software I got through Synaptic:  gtk-recordMyDesktop and Dolphin file manager.  Downloaded directly from creators’ websites, I got Wink, FreeFile Sync, and Parted Magic.  I did consider using Dropbox as well, because of its good reviews (by e.g., PC Magazine, Online Backup Tools, Laptop, and alternativeTo; but I decided that Windows Live Sync had important advantages even though I would have to run it in a virtual machine when I was booted into Ubuntu.

(Note:  a few days later -- possibly the first time I tried it after installing KDE -- Google Desktop search was no longer responding to its default Ctrl-Ctrl hotkey.  That is, its Quick Search Box was not coming up.  Something I saw on some webpage, as I was trying to fix that problem, made me wonder whether the KDE installation was to blame.  A tip that fixed it was to open the Google Desktop Search preferences and change the hotkey to Ctrl-F1.)

The last thing to do, in this round of tweaking, was to clean out unnecessary stuff from the drive on which I had installed Ubuntu, so that I could make a backup image in case I needed to reinstall – so that I could just restore the image, that is, instead of having to go back through all these steps.  This, I thought, called for something like the TreeSize utility that I had used in Windows to see where I might have files or folders taking up huge amounts of space.  Among what seemed to be several possibilities, I found an actual Linux version of TreeSize, so I downloaded that – but I also discovered Ubuntu’s Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyzer, whose Treemap Chart was especially interesting.  These revealed that my Ubuntu installation was not presently very large, so I didn’t have to worry too much about shrinking it for this particular image.  It also revealed that by far the largest space hog, within that installation, was the Google Desktop index of stuff on my hard drive, at 5.2GB.  I did see that the Google Chrome cache was also taking 400MB.  I went into Chrome’s Settings (the wrench icon at the upper-right corner) > Options but didn’t see any way to control that, other than to just clear the cache.  I decided to leave it for now, and changed some other settings while I was there.  And that was it.  Ubuntu 10.04 was tweaked, at least for now.

Installing Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope): Update?

In a previous post, I detailed the steps I took to install and configure 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). A few months later, I had an opportunity to install 64-bit Jaunty again - this time on a laptop. I used that previous post as an installation guide. This post refines and summarizes the steps detailed in that previous post.

First, in Ubuntu, choose these options: System > Administration > Update Manager > Check. (This one would ideally be postponed until you've done a couple of these other steps, but it may insist upon being run early in the process, in which case you may want to repeat it later.) Install updates. Restart if advised, and then run Check again, until there's nothing left to update. Applications > Add/Remove > Show All Available Applications. Then search for "restricted extras." Check the box next to "Ubuntu restricted extras." Click Apply Changes > Apply. System > Administration > Hardware Drivers. I was using an nVidia graphics card, and here I saw that my system was not using nVidia drivers, and that I did have a couple options to choose from. I chose to activate the recommended driver. I had to reboot before it would take effect.

System > Administration > Software Sources. Go to the Ubuntu Software tab > Download From > Other > Select Best Server > Choose Server. Also, go to the Third-Party Software tab, click Add, and type (or copy and paste) these lines, one at a time, from Launchpad's X-updates webpage into the "APT line" box:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main

(Each of those is a one-line command.) I had to click "Add Source" after each one in order to be able to install the next one. I also checked the boxes next to the two archive.canonical.com sources on that Third-Party Software tab. Then click Close. This called for a Reload of current software information. Before doing the reload, open Terminal and type these two lines:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys [OpenPGP key id]

sudo apt-get update

The OpenPGP key id came from the same (in this case, Launchpad's) webpage. What appeared on that webpage was "Signing key: 1024R/AF1CDFA9." The part that I needed to paste into the "sudo apt-key adv" command (above) was the part after the slash, i.e., AF1CDFA9. (If you don't get a "Reload" option when you click Close, go back into Third-Party Software and unclick and then re-click some item and try again.)

Remove Partition Icons from Desktop. A mere tweak, but it's easy. Alt-F2 > gconf-editor > Run > apps/nautilus/desktop. Unclick volumes_visible. Close the Configuration Editor. System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Search for each of these items and mark for installation when it comes up: boinc-manager; cups-pdf; fdutils (if you expect to be using a floppy drive); flashplugin-installer; gparted; ntfs-config; ntfsprogs; p7zip-full; pysdm; sun-java6-jre; and sysinfo. Also, optionally, uninstall evolution. (If numerous items come up in response to your search, click on the Package heading to sort them alphabetically. If some are already installed, no worries. Some of these may ask if you want to "Mark additional required changes?" Click "Mark" and go on to the next one.) Then click Apply > Apply. Then run System > Administration > Update Manager once more.

Optionally, move and/or reconfigure panels (i.e., the bars running across the top and bottom of the screen) and/or items on panels. Example: to make the bottom right-hand corner of the screen more similar to that of Windows, right-click on the left edge of the segment of the top panel that containts the date and time, unlock, move, and relock.

At this point, in a problem that had not come up during my previous installations of Ubuntu 9.04, I was not able to get the system to recognize my external USB hard drive. I have detailed the process of fixing that in a separate post. That problem ultimately involved wiping my hard drive and starting over with a new Vista-Ubuntu dual-boot installation.