This morning, for this first time in living memory, I had to scan a document.

The only scanner I’ve got is an old Microtek X6 SCSI device. I’ve got Ubuntu running on a desktop machine here as well as the Inspiron 9400, so I found and installed an  appropriate SCSI card (an Adaptec 2940, FWIW) in the desktop, plugged the scanner in and rebooted. xsane was already installed, so I had to do absolutely nothing else at all to get the scanner working. It fired up perfectly and worked first time. Brilliant.

I’m pretty much ready to give up on Eclipse for my Linux+Java development work. It’s too flakey. As much as I’d like to work in a modern Java IDE with all the refactoring goodness they bring to the party it’s just too unstable for me to use. It might work in other parallel universes, but on my laptop with an Ubuntu install that does everything else brilliantly Eclipse is a pain in the butt. I’ve had more success using vi and command line $CLASSPATH settings to get stuff done that I have within the Eclipse environment. It might just be my total lack of familiarity with it, and on a well tuned platform where the developers understand what it’s all about it might work great, but I’m not really all that impressed so far.

Happy to turn that opinion around if anyone has any comments about it.

It’s not an Ubuntu issue per se, but I’ve been really frustrated trying to get Eclipse setup and working correctly. It’s the first time I’ve seriously looked at Eclipse. The idea of a universal platform that your development tools plug into is good in principle, but I’m not convinced it’s there just yet. I’ve been trying to get the various components that I need for development work (little things, like JDBC drivers for PostgreSQL) and I’m struggling. The theory is that you install their data platform components and everything just installs and upgrades through the same universal mechanism, but it seems a little random. I don’t always get all the component repositories I’ve asked for, and each repository seems to have a different set of components available at various times. I haven’t figured it out yet.

I figure one of the things I should baseline is what I use the laptop for.

I’ve got five machines at my disposal:

1. This laptop, dual booting WinXp and Ubuntu 7.04. Take it with me most places.
2. A work issued laptop running WinXp. Carried between work and home.
3. A desktop running WinXp. Lives at home.
4. A desktop running Fedora Core 3. Lives at home, but I haven’t turned it on in months.
5. A bit bucket running WS2K3. Lives in the garage at home.

Most of what I do on the road with this laptop can be classified into three groups: software development, photography, and web access (browsing, email, bittorrent, etc). There’s also a bucket of miscellaneous stuff.

Software development

I get paid to write software. My day job is all about .NET development (primarily C#) but that’s potentially going to shift toward Java in the short to medium term. I’ve got a few after-hours projects on the run, and the biggest of those is also .NET. We’re coming pretty close to the point where that can be released into the world while we shift our attention to a companion product that will be Linux based. It’s going to be heavily oriented toward C++, but there might be some Java in there too.

That’s the primary reason I’ve installed Linux on the laptop — it will allow me to be mobile and work on the Linux stuff. The after-hours .NET stuff can probably shift to being totally run from the WinXP desktop at home, but I’m not quite ready to make that commitment just yet. It is good having it with me on the road.

• Linux scorecard: 10/10. Easily coped with.

Photography

Like lots of amateur photographers I don’t get as much time to go out shooting as I’d like, but I still do a fair bit. It’s not unusual to shoot 3-4GB of images a week. My workflow is primarily focused around Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop CS3. I can’t yet see anything in the Linux world that comes close to these, especially Lightroom.

I know The Gimp is touted as supporting some of the features of Photoshop, but the little exposure I’ve had to it has been a bit of a turnoff. The UI is a mess compared to CS3 and it certainly doesn’t have support for the plugins I’m used to using. I have yet to spend any real time looking into this though, so I might be a little off base here.

• Linux scorecard: 2/10. Has potential, but doesn’t seem to come close yet.

Web access

It’s a given that Linux has outstanding ‘net connectivity. The only real disappointment has been the whole podcast/iPod connection. Using iTunes that’s just so smooth; under Linux the iPod handling was a complete disaster. For me that’s a big problem, because I have a fairly heavy reliance on podcasts. I spend a lot of time working alone and I also spend a lot of time on the road, so being able to keep up with ideas and trends in the industry is very important to me.

The other thing I spend a lot of time doing in terms of web access is email. I’ve used Outlook for a long time but only as a local client backed by a gmail account. Using the native gmail interface is just fine too, and means that I’m totally independent in terms of which machine I use for email access. I’ve been drifting this way for a couple of months anyway, so losing Outlook on my mobile desktop doesn’t concern me at all.

• Linux scorecard for general web access: 10/10. No brainer.
• Linux scorecard for podcast access: 0/10. Totally broken. I rely pretty heavily on this, but can live with it not being mobile.

Miscellaneous

Like everyone there’s also a bunch of other stuff I do that’s random and miscellaneous. I’d actually include word processing and presentations in this category, as I don’t spend much time in the office suite at all. I hate Microsoft Word with a passion, even though I do have occasion to use it. All the documentation in my day job is in Word.

For my after hours stuff (and that’s the sole domain of the 9400) I’ve pretty much got total freedom in documentation, so LaTeX will do just fine. I know Open Office is installed but I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. I did use it to open up a PowerPoint pack with it a couple of days ago and everything worked perfectly. I’ll see whether this is of any use over the coming weeks and months, but right now I’m happy that what I’ve got can cope with the smallish documentation requirements I have.

One thing I haven’t looked into is a replacement for the smartdraw/visio class of application that I occasionally use for data modeling.

Mobile versus fixed

In the coming weeks and months I’ll need to consider how much of the stuff that Linux doesn’t do for me is absolutely required to be on the road with me. My feeling right now is that I could happily shift some stuff from the 9400 and take care of them using the WinXP desktop at home. Most of my image editing is done at home anyway; I’ll occasionally stick the SD card into the 9400 when I’m away from here, but I’ll usually do this stuff at home where I’ve got the wacom tablet, etc.

Sync’ing the iPod can probably be run from the desktop too. I typically load up a bunch of podcasts at home and I’ll be good for a couple of days. Right now I do occasionally pull down new stuff using the connection at work, but if I couldn’t do that any more it wouldn’t be a problem. And for the occasional use of the office suite (Word, Visio, etc) I can almost certainly do this at home.

I think I’ll leave the WinXP partition on the 9400 in place for now, but I can certainly see that it’s days are numbered. If the hard disk crashed and I had to setup the 9400 from scratch I’d think long and hard about whether I wanted any Windows stuff on there at all.