Cornerstone Software Ltd

I used a lot of cross-platform software already, so moving this off Windows to Linux was easier than it might have been. I pity anyone trying to migrate from Outlook on a dead Windows machine to anything else, for example.

I may have broken a few rules in how I’ve set up my Linux computer, but this is a personal computer, not a server, so I feel justified in creating a new partition and mounting it as /data.

One rule that I have broken is partly a personal one. But this is the rule anyway: My documents and application data belong in my home directory. Don’t create funny non-standard subdirectories under the root file system.
So of course the first time I have a computer to myself I break this rule.

This laptop came with a 250GB disk. I’ve partitioned it like so:
/boot - 6GB
/ - 60GB
/home - 60GB
/data 40GB
(plus stuff like swap and about 80GB unpartitioned space ‘cos there is just so much spare)

I highly recommend to anyone to put /home on its own partition. Means you can wipe out your root file system with a fresh OS install, without having to restore all your personal data. (You did back it up anyway of course…)

The reason I have this separate /data partition is partly because I want to share it neatly as a drive D: under my Windows Virtual machine, and also because I might need to change file systems (eg to NTFS) in order to make certain Windows things work. Could be interesting..

Where I don’t have a great need to share files, I keep them under my home directory in a “my” subdirectory. ~/my/documents and so forth. Not KDE defaults, but this way I get to choose the organisation and I can just back the whole lot up. I don’t recommend creating lots of subdirectories (work, personal, mail etc) directly in the home folder, there’s enough cluttering that already.

I’ve also used fusesmb to connect my network under ~/Network. An article about that in the Ubuntu community docs wiki.

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.
(more…)