How to dismantle an Atomic Bomb (otherwise known as de-stressing by migrating from Vista to Ubuntu)

Finally it's happened! I've been able to get off Windows Vista and install Gutsy Gibbon on my work laptop. Herein follows a few notes on things that I noticed, which may help others take the leap. This will probably get updated as I notice things that I've missed, or that went well.

1. Cygwin. I can't say enough good things about that project. It's been great to have on Windows and ultimately played a very important part in getting stuff off my laptop before wiping the hard-drive. I've found the people involved very helpful and responsive. My initial attempts to rsync data to a safe location failed. If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself, jwz, 2007. Contacting the mailing list led me to try the snapshot versions, report issues and see them fixed very quickly. Thanks Corinna and others.


2. Firefox. My profile was split over ${HOME}/AppData/Local/Mozilla/Firefox and ${HOME}/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/Firefox. I consolidated the two by copying to ~/.mozilla/firefox. The profiles.ini file needed editing, since it has an incorrect relative path to the profile folder. I also needed to rename extensions.rdf, so that a new one is built on startup. This preserved all of my extensions (apart from Google Toolbar; there is a Linux-specific version?) and associated data such as ModifyHeaders values, UserAgentSwitcher values, etc. I have needed to manually edit some preferences, such as Download location, and then restart Firefox for it to take effect, but otherwise it all seems to be working fine. Similarly for Thunderbird, although I should have exported my Lightning Calendars first - I seem to have lost them, but that's no biggie. I still have all of the emails (MBOX!) (although my tags seem to have disappeared. That's a bit of a pisser). Maybe I should have migrated that to GMail, rather than copying mboxes around, but it's worked.


3. SSH. I made sure that I copied my keys over and that they all worked. I seem to have missed the full known_hosts file; I have a copy, but some entries are missing, which is slightly annoying. Also, I forgot my System32/drives/etc/hosts changes, so I'll need to recreate the local aliases that I have for some servers. Sure I can remember that, so not too painful an omission.


4. sudo aptitude install tofrodos

Ubuntu just flies, versus the same hardware running Vista. That's a shocker, obviously ;-).

Update:

Eclipse was using a lot of file handles (I just install the world in terms of the number of plugins I have), which required an addition to /etc/security/limits.conf.

# raise limits due to Eclipse complaining about too many open files
* soft nofile 5120
* hard nofile 5120


Shell Meme for migrating off Vista

Backing up required files to my home machine first, prior to wiping Vista off the laptop this evening...


jabley@python:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
89 ll
70 sudo
61 cd
41 exit
38 aptitude
18 svn
15 rsync
10 mkdir
10 cp
6 which


Objective review of why Vista pisses me off (or Why isn't Vista more like Ubuntu?

So I'm being completely upfront in the title as to where I am on this one, but I think that it's worth giving some airtime to a few of these. Readers might care to note that they should route around the "grumpy Yorkshireman that doesn't like change" for some of these. You never know, I might get some comments explaining why I'm a bozo when it comes to Windows.

Avalon and the new Windows Aero UI.

I gave it two weeks and then I'd had enough. Does it really make me more productive having all that shit, or is it just effects for the sake of it? I have the same opinion on Compiz - I haven't yet seen a compelling reason for it to exist, beyond being secretly sponsored by Nvidia / ATI to make people get shiny new graphics cards. Let the conspiracy theorists chew on that one. And despite paying Dell more for a fancy graphics card in this laptop,



apparently it's not that good.

Blue screen of Death

No really, I had one in my first week, and I've had one since then. Lovely. Occasionally (once a quarter?) when running Ubuntu Dapper, I've had X lock up on me and be completely unresponsive, to the extent that I couldn't even switch to a virtual terminal or ssh into the box and do something to it. The first time this happened, I went climbing at lunchtime, came back and it was still borked, so just a hard reboot to fix that. A reboot once a quarter on a development machine doesn't strike me as too bad. Vista is managing once a week at the moment, and in neither case am I writing C or any system level code. It's all Java / Python / Ruby and that sort of level.

Black screen of death

That was a Vista new feature for me; I've never had that on previous versions of Windows. This is progress people!

Still no decent shell

I'm using Cygwin, but it doesn't seem to let me tail files and press Return to get some space in between lines. Minor, but annoying.

Continual swapping

Previously I was on a 2GB RAM Dell workstation, and now I have a 2GB RAM Dell laptop. The laptop is always swapping. What's changed? Well, I'm now on Vista rather than Ubuntu and I'm not running Oracle XE anymore, but otherwise the services running are much the same. IDEA / Eclipse, Tomcat, MySQL, Firefox, intermittent email client and a text editor. Don't know why Vista is always swapping (TaskMngr thinks it has 700MB free) but it's bloody annoying.

Broken file permissions

Doing a release today, the VPN crashed (don't know if that was Vista, BT, the Windows 2003 Server or something else. That appears to have left me with the following undeletable file.



So Vista has let me create a file that I don't have the rights to delete. That's smashing!

Random security policies

Or that's what I'm guessing is causing this anyway. If so, then a learning mode like AppArmor has would be nice. See


and



No, when I ask for a large amount of heap to be allocated for my Java process, I don't really know what I'm doing, so please stop me. Thank you Vista, you're my hero.

Update: LazyWeb to the rescue, at least about the disk thrashing issue.