As I mentioned in a previous article, I was anxious to get a new machine down here so I could once again have a serious development environment. I’m happy to say that I’ve now been up and running with Fedora Core 5 for close to two weeks. It wasn’t all fun and games.

First off, I had been using RedHat and Fedora Core versions of Linux for more than 5 years. I wanted to try something new, just to see what was out there. I heard wonderful things about Ubuntu, so I thought I would give that a shot. After verifying that the install would work with my hardware, by using the LiveDVD, I installed Ubuntu 6.0.6 and got to work. I am not sure exactly what I did wrong, but when I tried to install new applications using their package manager, I kept running into dependency mismatches that were not automatically resolved.

I honestly spent 2 days trying to get my system up and running with Eclipse, Postgres, IntelliJ, Apache ant, and the Sun JDK 1.5. It did not go smoothly, and things just constantly felt broken. Probably the biggest decision to bail was the fact that with a fresh install, Ubuntu did not recognize my dual core CPU. I wasn’t about to go down the path of recompiling the kernel for smp support. If I had more time, I would have attempted another install, in case I had selected a wrong option or something, but I had work that needed to be done.
So, I downloaded the FC5 DVD and got to work. After installing and applying all of the latest updates, I was ready to roll. The installer even recognized the 2 CPUs and installed a pre-compiled smp kernel. Nice!

Unfortunately, I soon discovered, that the brand new Shuttle I had custom built did not include the built-in internal 802.11g adapter. The nice folks at Shuttle offered to fix the problem for me after 7 days of phone tag. Their solution involved me sending the machine back so they could install the adapter. I explained that this was not an option as I am now living in Mexico, and shipping packages to/from the US was too much of a gamble. Well, at least they will refund my money… it’s been over 10 days and I still haven’t seen a credit, so I’ll be bugging them again this week.

Unfortunately, due to setup of our network, the router is located in our bedroom, and all our computer equipment is out in our living room. Therefore, I had a few options… 1) Run a long cable across the apartment to hook into the LAN connector (my wife would kill me), 2) Move my computer into bedroom (there’s not enough room, and my wife would kill me), 3) Buy a USB wireless adapter (can I find one in this part of Mexico?), or 4) Bridge my Windows XP machine so that I could access the network.

I decided option 3 was going to be the best, but I needed to find an adapter first. So, in the meantime, I was stuck with option 4. Suprisingly, Windows XP made the process quite simple, I’m quite pleased to say. Unfortunately, sharing a wifi connection bridged through another machine is probably a speed demons worst nightmare!

Eventually, a Belkin F5D7050 USB wireless adapter was located at the local Sam’s Club. Thanks NAFTA!

I had a bad feeling about Linux and USB and wireless cards playing nicely together. My fears soon became a reality. I spent the next 3 days trying to find a driver that would work with my adapter. The wireless chip on the card is supposedly a rt2500 (Ralink Tech 2500), although I can only access the card by using an unsupported legacy driver for the rt73. I was able to hobble along for a few days with using a tool called ndiswrapper to load the Windows driver… however, besides the fact that it didn’t work with wireless encryption, the stupid thing would cause a total system lockup after a few hours of use.

Luckily, I stumbled upon the Rt2x00 SerialMonkey website. These guys took over the maintenance of the Ralink proprietary driver when Ralink open sourced it. They are currently in the process of rewriting, from scratch, the drivers for all of the Ralink chips. Excellent. After I solved a few problems, namely compiling the driver on Fedora Core (it involves a manual patch), and finding the mislabeled firmware for my chip on Ralink’s site, I was up and running. It’s now been 2 days without a lockup.

Although I’m up and running with the SerialMonkey driver, I’m sad to report that any high volume network traffic (bittorrent) will cause the driver to freak out and unload. Luckily, I don’t need that to do my work.
I love the stability and reliability of Linux, the massive amount of open source and free software available; however, I am not shocked that more people haven’t made the switch just yet. Although things like the LiveDVD from Ubuntu will help some people get a feel for Linux, getting the system functional and easy to maintain still needs some work. I am positive that things will continue to get better. I look forward to it.

Last November, when my wife and I moved to Mexico, we packed our Honda Civic with some basic necessities: clothing, a digital camera, multiple Spanish dictionaries, books, a laptop, etc. Space was our limiting factor, so we decided that we’d only pack things that we truly thought we’d need for our 6 month stay. Unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to my computer lab, consisting of a few Linux desktops and a few Windows XP desktops. Not only that, I had to go back to sharing a computer. One of many sacrifices we had to make for the experience of living in a foreign country for half a year.

Fast forward to the present…

Sharing a computer with my wife, who is also a programmer and an avid internet research junky, was not much fun. Therefore, we have since purchased another laptop to ease our time sharing problem.
However, things are far from perfect.

I have been developing websites, internet applications, and software for the past 15 years. Most of that time has been programming on Unix and Linux machines. There were a few months, here and there, where I developed Windows applications, using Visual C++. However, I’ve always felt much more productive developing software in a *nix environment.

My Dell laptop is currently running Windows XP. It functions fine for web surfing, watching movies, photo and video editing, and keeping track of our ever dwindling finances. However, I just can’t seem to be very productive as a software developer on it. It feels like I only spend 40% of my time being productive. I’m not exactly sure what all of my issues are, but a few off the top of my head:

• Rebooting after installing or removing software. Why is this still necessary?
• Lack of a robust command prompt. Considering Windows is cut-and-paste friendly in most of their apps, why is it so difficult to add this functionality to the command prompt? Why does the copy feature (Mark) select a box region, and not work like every other cut-and-paste app? Why can’t I resize the app like every other app out there?
• Starting and stopping services. I hate digging through the control panel to find the service admin tool. There’s probably a command line way of doing this, but I haven’t discovered it yet.
• No virtual desktops. In a normal day, I’m probably switching between 7-10 active applications. Finding the one I want using Alt-tab or the taskbar repeatedly eats away my valuable time.

Yes, I know there are many add-on applications I can install to fix some of these issues, but the ones I’ve tried all seem kludgy.

For instance, I installed cygwin. Cygwin’s default terminal uses the command prompt, so I still can’t cut-and-paste. I assume I could set up xterm to do this, but after a few months, I still haven’t gone through the effort to find out how. Due to cygwin’s psuedo-paths and real Windows paths, setting up applications and scripts is a nightmare. All in all, cygwin has probably introduced as many problems as it has solved.

There are probably some real solutions out there, if I chose to find them. However, going out and finding them contributes to my 60% of unproductive time.

I’m just waiting for my next trip back to Chicago (in August), when I’ll retrieve one of my Linux desktops and end this misery.