LinLog

Well, after my dismal failure yesterday, I mostly got FreeSSHd working. Not sure if it was worth the effort or not, but we'll see.

Turns out the problem was with my expectations. Or maybe I can blame it on the (extremely) minimal documentation. You see, I said "yes" when asked if I wanted to run freeSSHd as a Windows service. Now, I figured that starting the freeSSHd program in the start menu while the service was running would allow me to configure that service and view its status. Yeah...not so much. Apparently running the config program actually tries to start another instance of freeSSHd. Hence why I was getting errors that the the port was in use. It was already being used by the service and I was unwittingly trying to spawn another instance.

It turns out that to configure the service, I need to start the config program, do my stuff, close the config program, and restart the service. At least, that seemed to do the trick - I'm not actually sure how much of it was necessary. After that, freeSSHd ran quite nicely.

My one remaining problem was authentication. I wanted to use NT authentication, which freeSSHd gives as an option. The problem was, it didn't quite work. After creating a user and setting it to NT authentication, I was able to log in...and that's it. I connected with Putty, entered my password, and freeSSHd immediately disconnected me. No warnings, no errors, nothing in the logs - just immediate disconnection.

The really odd thing was that NT authentication worked just fine if I ran freeSSHd by starting the config program rather than as a service. Running it as service, though, disconnected every time. The only time it didn't was when I disabled the "new console" option. Then the session would just hang and not accept input, which wasn't an improvement. I tried various settings and Googled fruitlessly, but no luck. I still have no idea what was going on. After mucking about with this for probably an hour and a half, I finally gave up and changed my freeSSHd user to use a SHA1 hashed password. That worked just fine, but feels like defeat.

The one thing I do like about freeSSHd so far is that it allows you to select your command shell. You actually get a native Windows shell instead of being forced into Cygwin weirdness. I changed mine from the default cmd.exe to PowerShell. That should make for a more pleasant experience.

Well, I did my Windows 7 install the other day. One day later, I'm doing pretty well. Ran into some problems, but so far the results are not bad.

Unsurprisingly, the actual install of Windows 7 was pretty uneventful. Pretty much the same as a typical Ubuntu installation - selecting partition, entering user info, clicking "next" a few times, etc. Nothing to report there.

The initial installation of my core programs was pretty easy too, thanks to Ninite. They have a nifty little service that allows you to download a customized installer that will do a silent install of any of a selected list of free (as in beer) programs. So I was able to go to a web page, check off Opera, Thunderbird, Media Monkey, the GIMP, Open Office, etc., download a single installer, and just wait while it downloaded and installed each program. Not quite apt-get, but pretty nice.

My first hang-up occurred when installing the Ext2IFS. Turns out that the installer won't run in Windows 7. You need to set it to run in Windows Server 2008 compatibility mode. And even after that, it was a little dodgy. It didn't correctly map my media drive to a letter on boot. It worked when I manually assigned a drive letter in the configuration dialog, but didn't happen automatically. It was also doing weird things when I tried to copy some backed-up data from my external EXT3-formatted USB drive back to my new NTFS partition. Apparently something between Ext2IFS and Win7 doesn't like it when you try to copy a few dozen GB of data in 20K files from EXT3 to NTFS over USB. (Actually, now that I write that, it seems less surprising.) The copy would start analyzing/counting the files, and then just die - no error, no nothing. I finally had to just boot from the Ubuntu live CD and copy the data from Linux. Still not sure why that was necessary.

I also had some interesting issues trying to install an SSH server. I initially tried FreeSSHD, which seemed to be the best reviewed free server. The installation was easy and the configuration tool was nice. The only problem was, I couldn't get it to work. And I mean, at all. Oh, sure, the telnet server worked, but not the SSH server. When set to listen on all interfaces, it kept complaining that the interface and/or port was already in use when I tried to start the SSH server. When bound to a specific IP, it gave me a generic access error (literally - the error message said it was a generic error).

After messing around fruitlessly with that for an hour or so, I gave up and switched to the MobaSSH server. This one is based on Cygwin. It's a commercial product with a limited home version and didn't have quite as nice an admin interface, but seems to work sell enough so far. The one caveat was that I did need to manually open port 22 in the Windows firewall for this to work.

The biggest problem so far was with setting up Subversion. Oh, installing SlikSVN was dead simple. The problem was setting up svnserve to run as a service. There were some good instructions in the TortiseSVN docs, but the only worked on the local host. I could do an svn ls <URL> on the local machine, but when I tried it from my laptop, the connection was denied. So I tried messing with the firewall settings, but to no effect. I even turned off the Windows firewall altogether, but it still didn't work - the connection was still actively denied.

I started looking for alternative explanations when I ran netstat -anp tcp and realized that nothing was listening on port 3690. After a little alternative Googling, I stumbled on to this page which gave me my solution. Apparently, the default mode for svnserve on Windows, starting with Vista, is to listen for IPv6 connections. If you want IPv4, you have to explicitly start svnserve with the option --listen-host 0.0.0.0. Adding that to the command for the svnserve service did the trick.

The last week or so, I've been going back and forth over what to run as the primary OS on my upgraded home desktop. Right now I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on it, but I keep thinking maybe I should switch to Windows 7. I'm using it to run Win7 under VMWare anyway, so I'm wondering if I should just invert the arrangement and run Ubuntu under VMWare instead.

So to help myself decide, I'm going to list out some of the various pros and cons. Of course, this is just for my case - this is not universally applicable, your mileage may vary, etc. I'm basing this list on my usage patterns over the last 2 year, since I started running Windows on some of my personal (i.e. non-company) machines again.

Every-day desktop software

This is obviously one of the biggest categories, and one of the reasons I'm leaning toward Windows 7 in the first place. For my every-day non-development desktop computing needs, I need the following tools:

1. Web browser
2. E-mail client (no, I don't want to use a web client, even if it's GMail)
3. Desktop RSS aggregator with multi-system syncing (no, I don't particularly like Google reader, except as a back-end)
4. Multi-format universal video player
5. Music player/manager
6. Podcatcher
7. Comic book reader

For items 1, 2, and 4, I already have favorite apps that are cross-platform - Opera, Thunderbird, and VLC. So those requirements are a wash.

Pro-Windows

On Windows, I'm currently using FeedDemon for RSS and MediaMonkey for music, and I quite like both of them.

On Linux, I don't have favorite apps for those. Recently, I've been using Exaile for music, but I'm not particularly attached to it. I just haven't found anything good since Amarok 2 came out (which I absolutely hate, despite really liking Amarok 1.x). As for an RSS reader, I've tried Liferea, but didn't particularly care for it. Mostly I've been either reading my feeds on a Windows box or just using Google reader, which I'm not crazy about.

Pro-Linux

On the Linux side, I do have a favorite comic reader an podcatcher: ComiX and gPodder respectively. However, I don't think either of them are really irreplaceable. While I don't have any complaints about gPodder, my podcatching needs are fairly basic - download and transfer to my MP3 player. I have a feeling the podcasting features of MediaMonkey would be just fine for this. The same is probably true of ComiX - I don't really need any complicated management features, just a good viewer for comic archives. I've played with a few other comic readers, and there are probably several that could do the job. For instance, HoneyView seems like it would fit my needs quite well.

Verdict: I have to go with Windows on this point. Most of the every-day stuff I really care about is either cross-platform or Windows-only, while I'm not really so attached to my current Linux tools.

Development tools

The development tools are a little different from the every-day tools. In part because, in many cases, there isn't really much of a choice. In the case of things like language-specific IDEs, you either use a particular tool and just use whatever platform it's supported on, or you make things waaaaay harder on yourself than they need to be. In other words, if you want to be idealistic in your platform choice, you suffer for it.

In my case, I'm currently doing mostly LAMP and FLEX work, and want to get into more .NET stuff on the side. That means that I need not only the IDEs and development tools, but also the supporting servers for those environments. I also need good command-line and scripting utilities as well as a good desktop virtualization package.

Currently, I favor Komodo Edit and gVim for PHP, Python, and other general-purpose coding, with a little Eclipse mixed in on occasion. Both of those are cross-platform, as are PHP and Python. For supporting servers, I also need MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite (more of a library than a server, but I'll list it with the other databases), and Apache, all of which are also cross-platform. So in terms of what I can use, it's a wash on all of that.

Pro-Linux

However, while most (if not all) of the LAMP stack runs on Windows, it's kind of a second-class citizen. In my experience, it's much easier to install and administer this stuff on Linux. Of course, that could just be because I'm more familiar with them on Linux, but that's not really the point.

In addition, Linux gets some points for the command-line. Granted, now that Powershell has come along it's not nearly as many as Linux used to get, but it still wins on ease of installing packages and having things like FFMPEG.

Pro-Windows

Obviously, Windows wins on everything dot-NET. IIS, Visual Studio, SQL Server - all of them are Windows-only and must-haves for anyone wanting to do "professional" .NET work, by which I mean work that "counts" on your resume. (No, Mono with MySQL isn't good enough, unfair as that may be.) It also wins on the FLEX front. While the FLEX SDK is cross-platform and runs on Linux, the IDE, Flash Builder, only runs on Windows and Mac. It's Eclipse-based, so you'd think it'd run on Linux, but it doesn't. Don't ask me why.

Windows also gets a small win on virtualization. Mostly, I use VMWare, plus a bit of VirtualBox, both of which are cross-platform. However, anybody who ever has to do IE compatibility testing will tell you how handy VirtualPC is. Not in and of itself, but rather because Microsoft puts out pre-configured images for testing IE 6 and 7. Just download, extract, and run - no hunting down copies of Windows with the appropriate IE version. Granted, it's annoying that the Windows installs on those images expire every few months, but they're still useful.

Verdict: I think I have to give Windows the edge on this one too, much as it pains me. I just need the Windows-only tools, and it's easier to run the resource-sucking ones like Visual Studio and Eclipse natively than in a VM. And as for the LAMP server tools, I can easily set up an Ubuntu server VM to run in the background without assigning it too many resources.

Remote access

I've gotten very used to being able to access my home desktop from anywhere. Therefore, I need some kind of secure, easy to use method for connecting to it. I also need it to be something I can set up on someone else's computer in 5 minutes without admin access. I do use Opera Unite for some of this, but that doesn't cover everything - I want something a little more robust and general purpose.

Pro-Linux

Let's face it - SSH rocks. There's just no getting around it. It's secure, simple to install, simple to set up, and simple to use. Also, it gets you full access to the command line, which is pretty powerful. I also tunnel VNC over SSH for nice, easy graphical access to my machine.

Pro-Windows

Let's face it - Remote Desktop beats the pants off of VNC. I mean, it's not even close. Granted, VNC is cross-platform, but RDP offers more features and it's a lot faster.

Also, there are SSH servers available for Windows. They're not as "native" as SSHD under Linux, but they still offer remote command-line shell (usually based on Cygwin, so it's Linux-like) as well as SCP and SFTP.

Verdict: It's pretty much a draw on this one. The SSH support for Linux is better, but Windows has some SSH and better remote graphical capabilities.

Inertia

When switching platforms, you need to account for overcoming the inertia of your current environment. That means coming up with new tools, new customizations, new data organization, etc.

Pro-Linux

Eight years is a long time. That's about how long I've been running Linux exclusively on my home desktop. I've been building up my environment since the bad-old-days when Netscape Navigator 4 was the best browser available and you had to recompile your kernel if you wanted to use a CD burner. I have scripts that won't run on Windows, symlinked configurations that won't work on Windows, and, or course, lots of things organized in a very UNIXy way.

Pro-Windows

The nice thing about Windows 7, as opposed to previous versions, is that it's a bit easier to organize things in a UNIXy fashion. Plus, there's always Cygwin and so forth. But really, there's not much to say here. The only saving grace here is that most of my existing Linux investment isn't irreplaceable.

Verdict: Linux, obviously. But while the margin is pretty good, it's not overwhelming. I don't do that much in the way of heavy customization anymore, so it's actually not as big an issue as it would have been a few years ago.

Final Verdict

Well, I'd say it's pretty obvious at this point. The preponderance of the pros seems to be on the Windows side.

On the one hand, the idea of this transition makes me a little uncomfortable. I've been a Linux user for a long time, and will continue to be one on the server-side. But at the same time, the more I think about it, the more sense this transition makes. While I'm still a Linux fan, I've grown less concerned with the desktop side of it. These days I'm more interested in things "just working" than in twiddling with my desktop or finding free software to do something I could as easily do with freeware. By the same token, distance has dulled any animosity I may have harbored toward Windows.

So we'll see how it goes. I actually installed Win7 on my desktop yesterday afternoon (I started this entry a week ago - just didn't get around to posting it). I'll be posting updates on my difficulties and migration issues. Hopefully it will be a pretty smooth process.

It's that time again - time to fix things after upgrading!

This time, I did something unusual for me - rather than copying my existing Ubuntu install over to the new drive, I just did a fresh install. This was partly because I'd been carrying around that same install for at least 3 years (probably more like 5) and partly because it was the 32-bit version, and I wanted to use the x86_64 version, what with the new CPU and all. Of course, I did copy across my home directory, so I'm probably going to see some config problems there, but that's just how these things go.

My first two problems were a little unexpected. The first was that the numeric keypad on my keyboard didn't work. I mean, it worked, in the sense that certain keys responded in approximately the desired way, but it didn't actually type any numbers. Fortunately, a little Googling turned up this post, which had a very quick fix - turn off the "mouse keys" in the keyboard config dialog. Not something I would have expected to be on by default.

The second problem took a few minutes for me to figure out, probably because it's still early. When I fired up Thunderbird and opened Lightning, none of my calendars were there. And I couldn't add them back - the dialog just didn't respond. The solution dawned on me when I tried to install the newer version of Lightning. The install bombed out, complaining that the package didn't support x86_64. Duh! I was still running the old x86 pre-upgrade Lightning binaries that were in my profile directory. Unfortunately, the main Lightning page didn't have any x64 binaries linked, so I had to go hunting. Turns out you can grab them from the contrib directory, so that was an easy fix too.

We'll see what else is broken over the next few days. Hopefully I won't hit too many more snags.

Hooray! Sarah agreed to let me order an upgrade for my desktop!

This is the first big, i.e. multi-component, upgrade I've had in 5 years. I got all the parts on Wednesday, installed them on Thursday, did the trouble-shooting on Friday and this morning, and am not posting this from my fully upgraded machine. And boy is it fast! Or, rather, it's fast compared to my pre-upgrade machine and the piece of crap laptop they gave me to use at work.

My pretext for this upgrade was actually a previous upgrade. For my birthday, I got a $50 Newegg gift certificate, which I used to order a new 1TB Samsung hard drive, because my 750GB Western Digital drive was down to about 20GB free. The up side is that between the gift card and a sale, I only paid $10 for the new drive. The down side was that I forgot to do my homework, so it turned out that the drive only supported 3Gb/s SATA II. Which was great, except that my old motherboard only did 1.5Gb/s SATA. So it was either upgrade, or buy a SATA II controller, which seemed like a waste of money.

So this upgrade was basically replacing the guts of the system - motherboard and CPU. I ordered myself an ASUS M4N68T-M microATX socket AM3 board, with integrated audio and NVIDIA GeForce 7025 video. I might have gotten something a little better, except that I had to set aside $25 of my budget for a new power supply, because my old one was making some troubling noises. For the CPU, I splurged a bit and got a 2.8GHz Athlon II X4 quad-core processor. I topped that off with 4GB of Crucial RAM (because 8GB was outside my price range).

So now I've got a quad-core with decent RAM, a modern video card (even if it is integrated) to replace the 64MB Radeon 7000 I'd been using, which didn't even support Compiz, and a bit under 2TB of total storage. Plus I can use the old 160GB hard drive I took out of my system in another old box which I intend to hook up to one of my TVs a low-end digital video player.

And for the first time in a long time, Ubuntu flies on my system!