My (Dramatized) return to Linux

5000 blaz­ing MIPS

*nix has always been my oper­at­ing sys­tem of choice. It really was what I started com­put­ing on at the Uni­ver­sity of Water­loo and con­se­quently has left a last­ing impres­sion on me. I am not sure if they still do it now, but I know when I started at Com­puter Sci­ence one of the myr­iad infor­ma­tion sheets you get as a frosh in the Depart­ment of Math­e­mat­ics was a list of com­mands for edit­ing in vi. Those sheets even had the splotches on them that early ink based dupli­cat­ing machines left. Some­times I won­der how many years back those sheets date.

I remem­ber the 100 level courses were all done on Win­dows com­put­ers with Java, but what was an eager bright eyed young Trinida­dian to do in a new coun­try and in a new school but sit down at a UNIX ter­mi­nal and try to fig­ure it out? It has been love since then. The first com­puter I ever pur­chased was an SGI Indy R5000 which I got on a insane deal used from the school news­pa­per where I worked. Early on I real­ized that if I wanted to do the “other-computer-things” that didn’t involve pro­gram­ming but were nec­es­sary to inter­act­ing with other peo­ple, I would need an oper­at­ing sys­tem that was a lit­tle more com­pat­i­ble with Win­dows. So I bide my time until “BSD” came to Apple hard­ware (yup we called Mac OS X a BSD clone back then), and after work­ing three jobs one sum­mer bought myself a shiny lit­tle iBook (which still runs to this day).

Nos­tal­gia and reli­a­bil­ity aside, I only actu­ally came to Apple for the mod­ern OS that ran on a UNIX. I always ran my lap­top along­side a UNIX machine, and even­tu­ally along­side a Linux machine. By and by even­tu­ally I started dab­bling with dig­i­tal media, and even­tu­ally print pub­lish­ing of all things for a soft­ware devel­oper to dab­ble in (remem­ber I worked at the school news­pa­per). This capit­u­lated my move com­pletely to Mac OS X, a move that I even­tu­ally became com­fort­able with, despite its ini­tial unset­tling feel­ings. In the inter­ven­ing 5–6 years, I did dark things. Pri­mary among them was com­pro­mis­ing my own core beliefs by pirat­ing com­mer­cial soft­ware* to run on my Macs.

But even­tu­ally it became too much when I began see­ing the piracy all around me capit­u­late to cowork­ers steal­ing very cheap designs from the inter­net to print. It reflected my own dirty per­cep­tion of my own soft­ware piracy and I broke. Long grave emails were writ­ten about piracy and sum­mar­ily ignored. I did some seri­ous soul search­ing on the sub­ject and real­ized I was wrong to go against my very own core beliefs and an the inter­nal rebel­lion started. Epic instru­men­tal music may have even been play­ing in the back­ground while I did said soul search­ing. I am not really sure, it is all a mon­tage to me.

I usu­ally hold on to my hard­ware for a long time and push them to the lim­its of their func­tion­al­ity, but that didn’t stop me from begin­ning the holy purge with a com­plete drive refor­mat. I was mov­ing to a point where I needed Cre­ative Suite less and less, but nev­er­the­less, I pur­chased it along with Microsoft Office and the lat­est Mac OS X. Even then I was slowly phas­ing out print pub­lish­ing but never lost touch with Linux as I was con­sis­tently deploy­ing server soft­ware onto it.

My mobile solu­tion will prob­a­bly always be Apple hard­ware I believe; mainly now just due to the fact that it has become so main­stream that I should have no prob­lems work­ing on loca­tion. But last year when I decided to use Ubuntu as my devel­op­ment rig on loca­tion build­ing the West 49 web­site I was blown away. The Linux desk­top expe­ri­ence had evolved into some­thing mod­ern in the last size years. Even more func­tional than Mac OS X in some respects. But there was more to it.

Not only was I writ­ing soft­ware with joy, I was hand­ily man­ag­ing the roles of Soft­ware Archi­tect, Project Man­ager, Devel­oper and even Account Exec to some degree. Ham­mer­ing away at a key­board writ­ing soft­ware on Ubuntu rein­stilled a fire in me that I had long for­got­ten. Yes Mac OS X has a ter­mi­nal, but it just wasn’t the same. Linux felt much purer and my Magento exten­sions didn’t have prob­lems with non-case sen­si­tive file systems!

My aging wheezy iMac G5 began to fail, so it was time to return to Linux. The guys at Canada Com­put­ers were well edu­cated as usual and walked me through the ropes of what was new in con­sumer hard­ware these days and what worked well with Ubuntu. Within a cou­ple hours I was at home look­ing at almost a dozen boxes of com­puter parts ready to jump in. No anti-static wrist­band needed, I was going to ride this on the wild side ready to tear in. Two mis­matched parts, a rats nest of wires,  three lost screws and a live USB drive later I was ready to return to my Linux.

Things that took me com­pletely by sur­prise in Mav­er­ick Meerkat:

• The new Ubuntu font is absolutely gor­geous (The print admirer in me may never die in this cold cold dig­i­tal age)
• HDMI audio and video out to my mon­i­tors just work
• Mul­ti­mon­i­tor video just works
• Log­itech Opti­cal Track­man works bet­ter than Mac OS X ( still can­not rec­og­nize one but­ton though )
• It was half the price of a new Mac but thats noth­ing new
• Drop­box just works
• Sadly my mus­cle mem­ory on ALT and CTRL keys are Mac style now, but that key mod map change just works
• Visu­als are so much more refined, did I men­tion the drop dead gor­geous new Ubuntu font with 10.10?
• There is so much more built in than Mac OS X its astounding
• Con­nect­ing to a net­work share via AFP was more reli­able on Ubuntu than on Mac OS X
• Soft­ware instal­la­tion has had major improve­ments, Ubuntu Soft­ware Cen­tre is the open-source god­fa­ther of the Mac App Store

Nev­er­the­less I still have tons to learn again. I used to have a set­ting on Mac OS X to open three ter­mi­nals side by side to com­pletely fill my screen depend­ing on which screen I had hooked up to it. But now I want to inves­ti­gate this thing I have been read­ing about called tmux. It would be a dis­tinct improve­ment if I could just open open ter­mi­nal, make it full screen and have three “ter­mi­nals” side by side there to code. Thats prob­a­bly a task for tomor­row to install tmux and test it while I set up my git and build sys­tems. Blogs shall fol­low on my expe­ri­ences with tmux.

All in all I am thrilled and com­forted that I have returned back to where I was.

*Dis­claimer: I now own a fully licensed ver­sion of Cre­ative Suite and Microsoft Office, please for­give me Adobe, Microsoft. I was young and stupid.

**If you clicked on this post look­ing for cute furry ani­mals, I apologize.