Linux on a Windows developer’s laptop - Part 1 of N
Well, I have a new laptop computer (Asus M51sn) as my primary machine, and finally I get to use Linux as my personal operating system - something the rest of my household has done for years. A reversal of the usual story where the geek uses Linux (or BSD or…) and has a partner or kids using Windows (usually because of lack-of-geekdom, or the need to play games).
I have been running such cross-platform apps as Openoffice.org and Firefox/Thunderbird but still had a very heavy need for Windows-only tools for a good deal of my day job - programming in .NET and Visual Foxpro. I wasn’t happy with running such things under Wine and my old computer wasn’t grunty enough to virtualise a Windows development environment (heavy development with ASP.NET websites or Windows Mobile PDAs was bringing it to its knees a bit anyway).
This has changed, and though I’m not the most reliable blogger in the world, some of things I’m doing to make this work could be interesting to the world. So here I go.
The background story is that a couple of weeks ago the screen on my old laptop died. The estimate to fix it was a new screen at approx NZ$400 - not significantly less than the value of a working 3Ghz P4 on Trademe. That’s less than the cost of a NEW laptop - but I’d still have a 3-year-old heavyweight laptop with mere minutes of battery life. I’d been planning on replacing it later this year anyway, but I was a bit miffed at having it fail in a way which is close to uneconomic to fix. I had been planning to retire it from work and turn it into a dedicated music machine. Fortunately it is partially usable with an external monitor so I can ease into a new machine gently. And a brand-new external LCD monitor is considerably cheaper than the repair.
The new machine, as the numerous stickers all over it proclaim, is a Core2 Duo 2.4GHz, with 3GB RAM. It came preinstalled with Vista but I never bothered with that - its first boot was on the Linux install CD.
It’s now running Ubuntu 8.04, 64-bit with KDE3. I decided to be brave and trial KDE4, which lasted for nearly a whole weekend, but while it was pretty, I wasn’t productive. I can see the future there, and KDE development is progressing daily. When Intrepid comes out I’ll consider again whether to switch.
At least, unlike my old machine, the Kubuntu Live CD comes up with nearly all the hardware working, so I can test out newer versions without lots of work. If anyone else is considering an M51 - it is great. The wireless networking works. The Webcam is bog standard, the audio works. Many of the special keys (pause/play/stop, volumne). The same cannot be said for KDE4.1 beta however - sound was broken and so forth. I may blog on this in more detail later.
For work purposes I’m running Windows XP under VirtualBox. There’s some challenges ahead here but I’ve seamless window support with KDE, and networking to the Windows domain works satisfactorily. Still to come however are Visual Studio, and connecting to PDAs via USB/ActiveSync. Since the latter is something which barely works under Windows alone, I’m not looking forward to it.
[Updates: Edits for grammar/clarity]