Thoughts of a physicist

Dumping 32-bit for 64, and maybe Ubuntu for something else too?

scili — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:40:28 +0000

At the moment, my laptop runs 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10, despite the processor (an AMD Turion 64 X2) being x86-64 capable. I wouldn’t have any perceptible performance change should I change to a 64-bit OS, primarily because with only 2 GB of RAM everything can be addressed with only 32 bits. However recently I’ve decided that, with 64-bit being the future of computing (as one of my friends often cites when I ask him why he persists trying to hunt down 64-bit drivers for his <4 GB machine, when there are 32-bit versions much more readily available), and my processor being capable of it, I’m going to move to 64-bit.

It thus seems to be a prudent time to also check out some of the other desktop Linux distributions out there to see if there’s anything I’m missing. Firstly I need to narrow down which distros suit my needs, and then I can test drive them by making a live USB with UNetbootin. The important requirements for me include:

Easy installation of a Broadcom driver for my Dell 1390 wireless card (please, no more ndiswrapper!);
A large repository of packages, which don’t need compiling from source and are reasonably recent versions of software;
A sizable online community to ease troubleshooting;
A well featured dependency resolution tool;
A graphical installer.

Taking these into account and after a little reading about the resulting matches brings to my attention three strong candidates: Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. There were a few others, but they all lacked a little from my list of requirements or didn’t seem to do anything better than the above three.

Now as I’m re-assessing which distro I use, I might as well do the same for my desktop environment. Currently I use GNOME 2.28, but I have dabbled with KDE a few times in the past. Although I’ve found several features of KDE really useful, I’ve so far stuck to GNOME for a multitude of reasons. Of course, these aren’t the only options with others such as Xfce being available. This choice is a whole other can of worms though, and one I think I’ll leave for another post, another day!

Dropbox

scili — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:45:49 +0000

Just yesterday an invitation popped up in my inbox to join Dropbox, which for those of you who aren’t familiar is a cloud-based storage and file synchronisation service. You can sign up to Dropbox for free, and after downloading the client (which is cross-platform, with versions available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux) a folder My Dropbox is placed in a directory of your choice. Any files copied into the Dropbox folder are immediately synced with, and can be accessed from, https://www.dropbox.com/, but you can also link the client on any other system (on any of the above OSs) to your account and the contents of My Dropbox will be synced between them, with the service usefully seeing which system has the last modified version of any single file and updating all the other systems with this version.

Now this wasn’t at all new news to me, but I’ve never used cloud storage or synchronisation before (apart from Ubuntu One a bit to move things between my Linux systems and to back them up when I’m fiddling with distros) simply because I didn’t see any need. I prefer keeping my personal data just that –- personal — rather than up in the cloud, and I’ve never found transferring things by flash drive to be any real hassle anyway.

However, a relative who does enthusiastically use Dropbox invited me, unashamedly for the purposes of getting an extra 250 MB of storage for himself (the standard allowance is 2 GB, although there are monthly subscription services for 50 and 100 GB), so I thought I’d give it a try. And to my surprise, I’m actually finding it pretty handy. The cloud storage is of no consequence to me, although in the future I may use it from the web interface when I’m out and about, but the synchronisation of files between my systems is useful for avoiding mix ups between current and outdated versions of documents, and the clients for multiple platforms provides me with the best way of transferring files between systems running different OSs I’ve yet come across.

So if, like me, you’re sceptical about how cloud computing can really help you, why not give it a go? It might turn out to be a different experience to what your preconceptions suggest, as it certainly was for me!

Needing a tool, and being a tool

scili — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:23:19 +0000

Having just swapped out a laptop SATA drive using a vegetable peeler and a bread knife, I think it’s really about time I bought a small screwdriver. I seem to remember saying that to myself before quite some time ago…

And as I was screwing the caddy back together with aforementioned vegetable peeler I realised I hadn’t removed the laptop battery before I started. Not advised!