It’s been 6 or 7 weeks since I’ve posted anything to this blog. And there’s a reason for that — absolutely nothing has happened that’s caused me to have to change anything about the Ubuntu installation on my laptop. It’s just working perfectly.

So perfectly, actually, that I nabbed 20GB of spare hard disk space on the Dell D820 that work provide me with and installed Ubuntu 7.10 there too. Again, works perfectly. Nothing to see here… move along.

I’ll probably start morphing this blog into more of a ‘what I’m working on’ than an Ubuntu diary because I really have found that everything is just so easy to work with. It isn’t like there’s anything especially complex that I can share with the world. I am really, really impressed with this distro.

I mentioned a day or two back that bitbucket (our Win2K3 server) was about to be turned off after migration of its data and services to our Ubuntu desktop. Well, it’s been done. The LAN has no more Windows machines on it.

Actually, that’s not quite true, because the Inspiron 9400 is setup for WinXP/Ubuntu dual boot. Having said that, when I’m at home I spend far more time in Ubuntu that WinXP. There’s certainly no more permanent Windows machines on the LAN. The only time I really use WinXP is for photography, because I need Lightroom.

I’ve had to do a few things to get this done.

1. Migrate the subversion repository from the bitbucket to the Ubuntu machine. Easily done. Backup the repository on bitbucket, create a new repository on the Ubuntu machine and load from the backup. Notes here and here.
2. Copy around 200GB of data from bitbucket to the Ubuntu machine. Here I cheated. I dropped bitbucket and took the hard disks out. I’ve mounted them as NTFS partitions on the Ubuntu machine and I’m copying the data across to other disks. Once I’m done I’ll reuse the bitbucket drives as additional storage on the Ubuntu machine. I’ve got a 160GB disk that will become the /home partition. Should do for now.
3. Setup the new bug tracking system and import all the data from FogBugz. Easy done.
4. Setup a wiki and import all the data from the SharePoint server. I haven’t done this yet, but it won’t be too difficult.

Oh, one other bonus thing: I spent so much time using ssh to go back and forth between the i9400 and the Ubuntu machine I looked up automatic ssh login (ie: no password prompt). Details here. Piece of cake.

I’ve had wonderful success with Ubuntu over the last month. There have been no posts for nearly 3 weeks, because nothing exceptional or worth mentioning has happened. It just works.

Based on this success I’m planning the most drastic change to our local network that I’ve made for quite some time. We’ve essentially got 3 machines here: the Inspiron 9400 I do all my work on, a desktop machine running Ubuntu 7.04 (turned on and off as required) and a Windows Server 2003 machine that runs 24×7 to host a couple of things as well as all our files. It’s called “bitbucket” for a reason.

Anyway, bitbucket is getting turned off. The last Windows machine on the LAN is going. I plan to move all the files from bitbucket to the desktop Linux machine and use a mix of samba and nfs to access them from the 9400 and any other machines that occasionally see action on the LAN. That Linux desktop will then stay on 24×7.

The two services that bitbucket provides are FogBugz and SharePoint. They’re both going too.

FogBugz has been very good to me for a long time, but I’ve become quite frustrated with it over the last 12 months. The user experience definitely took a turn for the worse when version 5 was released with all the AJAX stuff in it. It was not their finest release. Version 6 looks interesting based on all the work that Fog Creek have put into the evidence based scheduling, but I’m so far behind in support it will cost a small fortune to get back up to date. I’m much more inclined to put that money into a JIRA installation. It’s what we use at work, and it’s a far superior product to FogBugz in so many ways. Also, given that evidence based scheduling and Agile are completely different approaches, and that we’re much more aligned with the Agile way of thinking, EBS is of questionable value.

SharePoint has worked reasonably well too, but I’ve never quite liked it. We had a wiki a long time ago for lots of the collaborative work we were doing, and I moved away from that because (a) it was degrading into a big ball of mud, as wiki’s often do, and (b) some of the other collaborators preferred a document sharing model. I found they were often using local MS Word documents to compose things and then pasting the content into the wiki. I suggested SharePoint, we went with that (it was part of the Win2K3 installation anyway) and had some success, but I’ve always preferred the wiki way. I’m likely to push back in that direction again. The only real challenge will be keeping it organised. I have some ideas about how to do that based on what I do with the wiki we run at work: have an administrator create the structure and framework of the pages that you’re working with, and collaborators simply fill in the text. We have a pretty narrow problem domain that we’re tackling in terms of software development, so that won’t be too hard.

The only other thing that bitbucket does is host the subversion repository. Moving that to the Linux desktop should be trivial.

Once this is all done I might even consider running asterisk on the Linux desktop and routing my Engin VOIP connection through it. Maybe. We’ll see.

I’ve been a Linux user since the good old days of Slackware 0.91. That’s a while ago now. Sadly, my day job pays me to use Microsoft products, so for a long time Linux has been something of an occasional escape. I’ve got a slight change of landscape coming up though, so it’s time to get re-acquainted with an old friend. I bought myself a Dell Inspiron 9400 last year so I can work on the road, and I’ve recently rejigged things a little so I’m running Linux on it. After much consideration and research I went for the Ubuntu distribution and was rewarded with a working 1920×1200 LCD and 3945 wifi connection.

It hasn’t been all plain sailing, however, so I’ve started this blog for two reasons. The first is to share my experience with others who are looking at running Ubuntu (and in some instances, any Linux installation) on a laptop. Because of my hardware this will be oriented toward my Inspiron 9400 experiences, but it might help others who are going through the same issues I am. The second reason is that I’ll have a handy google resource for searching through what I’ve done should I need to review later. I’m still running a large Windows partition, and at some time in the future I might consider blowing that away and running purely Linux on the laptop. We’ll see though. There’s some stuff that just doesn’t work at all, and I have to decide whether I need that on the road or not.

Anyway. That’s basically what this blog will be about.