Developing Chris

Ubuntu getting started again

2009-07-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

I have taken the plunge, and on my home machine, I replaced my drive and have installed ubuntu. No dual boot, no safety net, just switch. I have ubuntu on the living room browser laptop, so its not totally foreign. Getting used to the little quirks of the windowing system being developed by a bunch of different people is interesting.

Here are my notes thus far. Gnome, sorry but you are not as snappy or tight as KDE. KDE looks better, is more uniform, and seems to be more stable thus far. My absolute favorite thing about kde, 1 control panel tells you all the key bindings for kde applications, instead of having to remember to setup each app and look for conflicts.

Secondly, if you are going 64 bit, ubuntu is a little bit lacking on packages that are 100% 64 bit, you will have to wing it a little bit. When winging it, the first thing you must install is the 'build-essential' package, which will allow you to build things from source into your environment. Unfortunately the error you get when you don't have this is cryptic and not fun to track down.

Third, if you want to rip dvds, you have to get libraries to break the encryption, before you try and find an app that actually does the ripping. The tutorial that got me through this without pulling my hair out, is at lifehacker (here). The short story to that article is: use k9Copy get Libdvdcss first. If you are on 64 bit, you will need to build libdvdcss as a deb doesn't exist for 64 bit.

Finally, get your development and podcasting stuff setup in amarok and vim and you are off.

I'll let you know my progress, thus far, its been a little dicey given that I decided to quit cold turkey, and literally pull the drive from the cage, but overall, a nice switch. I'm currently running firefox (20 tabs), gvim, dev web server, and terminal (3 tabs), as well as instant messenger. 152 processes, 1.1 gig of ram. You just can't beat how efficient the os is at not eating your memory, even in 64bit mode.

Vim

2009-06-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

I've been learning to use Vim for the past week or so. It's crazy how arcane, yet second nature it can become to someone who would rather type than use a mouse.

The tutorial that has really helped me cross the bridge of having a go at having it be my #1 editor is called A Byte of Vim. Its a good self published e-book that is really good at getting the beginner up and running.

I'm by no means an expert, but its been interesting relearning how to edit.

:w vim.blog

Liking blogger thus far, getting the design down has been challenging

2009-06-15T19:29:00.001-07:00

What do you think so far? any feedback is appreciated, working on an icon/header image for where I want to go.

Hosting my blog at blogger now

2009-06-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

I've started a few projects, and want to do blogs for all of them, so I'm gonna put them all on blogger and have them all serve up as their own domain but have 1 place to post to all of them. Thanks for your patience as I reset all my feeds and everything.

yes, it seems way too obvious that I'm telling you, that you are here.