Daemon to Penguin

I've been using and blogging about FreeBSD for about five years now, and I have been dabbling in Linux even long longer. My main server, which hosts about 5 web sites, currently runs FreeBSD 6 and I'm still very happy with it.

However, my main operating system has been Microsoft Windows pretty much ever since Windows for Workgroups hit the scene. Although I got my start in programming on a Unix box, most of my professional life has been spent on either DOS (mostly game programming - what fun EMS, Extended Memory and near/far/huge pointers were!), then on to Windows programming. I had been a pretty satisfied user of Windows, especially Windows 2000, although I was always drawn back, like a moth to the flames, to the Unix and Linux world. I have burned many a CD with virtually all the major Linux distributions and BSD flavors.

I settled on FreeBSD for my server because I love the control it gives you. Compiling packages via source code allowed for easy customization by this inveterate hacker, so I could tweak all I wanted. Keeping it up to date is still a bit of a chore, but the trade off in simplicity and openness (the BSD license is a beacon of clarity compared to the Windows license or even the GPL) made the annual pain worth it.

But late last year I became disenchanted with Windows as my personal operating system. I became more involved in Redhat Linux programming for my job and just wanted to be free of the black box that is Windows. I decided to once and for all throw off the Windows shackles and move to a free operating system (not that I have ever paid for Windows - as a developer, I got them all free of charge from Microsoft).

My first choice was FreeBSD. It's a little barebones and I really didn't want to spend my days tweaking it, so I moved to the wondefully complete PC-BSD version of it. A simple, turnkey FreeBSD "distro" with a vibrant user community, I settled into it quickly and became a frequent contributer to the forums. There were a few bumps on the way to fulltime BSD (well, save for dual-booting into Windows XP to play games), but I soon was enjoying the ride.

But then it started to be a drag. Each and every day seemed to bring new challenges that just took too much time to solve. I really wasn't in it for hackers paradise - I wanted an OS that just worked. The last straw was trying to get my dual monitor setup working. Literally days of xorg.conf tweaking later only gave me partial satisfaction, so I began looking around at Linux distros.

After a week or so of trying all the popular distros, I settled on openSUSE. I didn't know about the "sleeping with the enemy" reputation of Novell, for better or for worse, so it didn't enter into my consideration. This was way back in May of this year and I couldn't be happier.

Here is my list of why Linux is better than FreeBSD for me. Of course, everyone will hav their own ideas, but this is my article, so this is my list!

• Better support. And by support, I mean it in so many ways, from an enthusiastic user community, to hardware driver support to resources you can turn to in a pinch.


• Better tools. While I don't mind getting my hands dirty with a text config file, my days of having the time to figure out the nuances of every little text string are long gone, so I truly appreciate having GUI admin tools.


• Bigger installed base. No longer do I feel like the forgotten stepchild when it comes to getting media files to run, viewing Flash sites, playing music CDs, etc. While Windows remains the 1000 pound gorilla in the closet, Linux must run a close second to the Mac as far as third party support goes. I can't even begin to tell you the hoops you needed to jump through to get Flash to work on PC-BSD. And my Palm Pilot? Forget it!


• More resources. I mentioned this in the first point, but it deserves its own entry. I'm a real information hog and love the plethora of print and electronic information sources for Linux. I grabbed a bunch of books, bought all the magazines, started reading all the web sites, rolling around in the information like Scrooge McDuck rolling around in his coins.


• Fun. I love how vibrant and even fractious the Linux community is. FreeBSD feels a little inbred at this point, with a serious (and understandable) "us against the world" mentality, while the Linux crowd is looking to conqueror the world. And I am psyched to be a part of it!

Dancing Around

A couple of changes here at Daemon World Headquarters. First up is the URL change. To reflect my general concentration on Linux rather than FreeBSD, I've gone to a URL of http://linux.amazingdev.com rather than freebsd.amazingdev.com. I've added a redirect to Apache (I think) which should make the change relatively unobtrusive, but who knows?

Secondly, I have added a Tumblr page dedicated to short Linux blurbs, or tumblrs. You can find it here: JD's Linux Love. This is where I'll put links, pictures and the like. Daemon Dancing will be more focuses on longer how tos and notes.

Fresh Linux Baking

A couple of new Linux apps coming over from the dark side that have me squealing like a little girl!

• Dropbox - a very simple service that offers 2gb of synchronized storage. You can even make share selected files publicly. There's already an openSUSE package for it as found here. Unfortunately for me, a KDE user, it comes prepackaged with a GNOME Nautilus interface. It runs a small daemon (dropboxd) and then shows the Nautilus interface. The Nautilus stuff is opensource, but the daemon isn't :( But perhaps they will document the interface, as Filip L. has reversed engineered it and wrote a Python script here. And they are asking for folks to write KDE and other front ends.

  
  

  Joel of Joel on Software has a nice little post about how to synchronize passwords between your Windows & Linux boxes using PasswordSafe on Windows and Password Gorilla on Linux, here, and storing the file on Dropbox.

  
  




• Launchy - a favorite of the Lifehacker crew, the Linux version was finally released. Launchy is a program in the same line as Gnome DO and Katapult. I had been using Katapult, but I found that showing only one option when there were many possibilities too limiting. Launchy fixes this with a very nice drop down showing all possible completions. It also has a nice plugin architecture, which I haven't explored much yet. I still sorely miss PowerPro on Windows, but what can you do?

Yet Another Backup Solution

In these days of US$150 1 terabyte hard drives, there is simply no reason not to have multiple hard drives and implementing a regular backup plan. Of course, I don't have one and feel like I'm walking the high wire without a net. I've installed a couple of GUI rsync frontends, but haven't done anything with them. I even did some work to try and update dar to work, given its orphaned status (although they finally updated it in the openSUSE repositories), but still haven't done anything. Here's another tool that looks easy to use, although I really think I should set up a real bacula setup for all the home computers.

BackupGem Manual

Backup is the easiest and most flexible backup, archive and rotate tool. It’s a beginning-to-end solution for scheduled backups in a clean ruby package that is simple use and powerful when customized.

Back in the Saddle

As you may have noticed (for both of my readers), I am back to updating Daemon Dancing instead of helping out at Linux Brain Dump, as LBD seems to have slipped into a funk lately. So I figured I would just go back to working on Daemon and trying to update the look and feel of it. But I had forgotten just what an incredible time sink it can be once you begin playing with your blog look! Just a few minor tweaks (like trying to get the search box to work) took a couple of hours, as I played with all kinds of settings. And, as you can probably see, this is a pretty plain vanilla Movable Type blog!

Anyway, look for more Linux, FreeBSD and other FOSS software ramblings to show up here again.

Just a quick note on FreeBSD - while I don't run it on my home desktop, my server (the one that hosts this blog, for instance), runs FreeBSD 6.1 (a little out of date). I finally bit the bullet and did a full package upgrade and lo and behold, it went like a champ, despite the long delay between updates. At least I had the portsnap cron job running, so that part was kept up to date. The first portsnap update command took a very long time, but after a few carefully chosen upgrades, I just jumped in with both feet and the portmanager -u command did it all. Of course, I haven't tried rebooting yet, which is the real test. But still, very nice.

AIRing it out

Very nice intro to AIR on Linux found at Linux Journal. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is Adobes push for a crossplatform rich Internet app "operating system". I've been using it for Twhirl, a very nice Twitter client. For some reason, there are many Twitter clients using AIR. Adobe claims AIR to be only in an "alpha" state for Linux, but it has been working for me pretty well.

The only obvious shortcoming is that, according to the Twhirl author, the Linux version doesn't support the password encryption that is found on the Windows client, so it doesn't store passwords. And there are some rough edges for the UI, like the super-annoying Mac-like restriction of only resizing the window via dragging the lower right corner. And the auto-update feature doesn't work. You have to download the update file for the app and install it yourself. But it has been very stable for me and I'd like to look more into programming with it.

An Introduction to AIR

Vee Dee Eyes page

Cool page providing a bunch of VDIs, which are images you can use in VirtualBox, my current favorite OS emulator. These VDIs are pre-installed OS images that run in VirtualBox and let you quickly try out any OS (mostly Linux, of course).

Sun xVM VirtualBox VDI Index | veeDee-Eyes

The VirtualBox "Virtual Disk Image" Index
VDI images of pre-installed "Open Source" Operating System distros.
It's a computer inside your computer.