Geeky: August 2006 Archives

Typo has long been a nemesis of mine... I've attempted installation at least four separate times, and documentation is, at best, pretty limited. After the last attempt, I simply threw up my hands and shelled out some duckets for a Movable Type license.

Movable Type is awfully cool. I like how it does things. I like a lot of its newest features. The interface is good enough for government work, and is nice enough looking, I suppose. All in all, I was very satisfied with it. So why move to Typo?

Well, Typo is a Rails app. And I, as everyone who knows me already knows, am obsessed with learning Rails right now. So getting Rails apps running and looking at the entrails is... appealing to me right now. After all those failed attempts, however, I was starting to lose faith (in a lot of things, not just Typo), but then I stumbled on this article. It's a fairly well-written wiki that is only useful to people with a technical background. That's not to say I have a technical background - but I can fake it well enough to stumble through it.

15 minutes later (yes, 15 minutes!) and Typo is humming along nicely. So far, I like its style, I like the way it does things, and I need to run around its innards with rollerskates. Oh yeah, and I need to somehow import all my entries from the MT blog... *groan* I'll figure it out somehow. ;)

Wow, maybe it's just because I've been pounding away at an OSX machine for so long that I've somehow inadvertently become adept with a un*x box... or maybe Ubuntu is friendlier than my last foray into the Linux universe... or maybe I haven't tried anything *really* exciting yet. Here's the story so far...

Installation wasn't as breezy as advertised. Well, no, that's not fair. I'm sure installation would be straightforward enough on a more... serious machine, replete with gobs of RAM and a chunkier processor. However, this poor little machine only had 256mb of RAM, and it plugs along on an old Celeron 1.8gHz. I'd get two steps into the install, and the whole machine would lock up tighter'n... well, tight.

I was under the impression (mistakenly) that Linux would have lighter requirements than Windows XP, but no, the documentation states that the minimum requirements are 512mb of RAM. Annoying? Kinda... I tried installation with the "Alternative", text-based install, but to no avail. Blegh.

So I had to scrape up another 512 DIMM (two 128 DIMMs and two slots in the Optiplex), so I ended up with 640mb. Installed just fine, got GNOME all juicy and running nicely... and I thought "why aren't they using KDE?". What little experience I do have with Linux is associated with KDE, and the way Ryan (resident Linux/Unix monkey and overall impressive guy) described it: "GNOME is The Windows Way, KDE is The Mac Way." Indeed.

So I'm gonna start playin' around with this crazy thing. More to come!

So I keep hearing about "Ubuntu" this and "Ubuntu" that. I look it up, and it's african for "beautiful friendship" or "harmonious companionship" or "happy network administrators". One of those wild untranslatable words that means a hundred things. Aside from that, however, it's also apparently some new and special distribution of Linux.

Tim Bray of Ongoing has been keeping track of his experiences with Ubuntu on a super-swanky new Sun Ultra20. Sweet box, 64-bit processor, a small country's worth of RAM. I wish I had a reason to drop some dough on a piece like that - but I really don't. And "playing with a linux distro" doesn't quite justify it (for me, at least - Tim, however, got himself a great deal on it, so it's all good... I wish I had that kind of connection to the community...)

Anyway, Tim's been giving these little glimpses into it, things that work and things that don't, that sort of thing. In the spirit of this, I'm going to do something very similar, only my notes will be based on experiences with a really, really old and crappy Dell Optiplex G60, scavenged and patched together from three defunct Optiplexes. Way I figure, if it runs on this machine (and runs well), I'll be able to get a pretty good opinion of how it'll do in a more... stressful... environment. And so, the adventure begins! Ubuntu is currently being downloaded in several different flavors, and we'll see what happens.

Could it replace my Powerbook? Would it? I'm thinking that's not the purpose behind this experiment (aside from the fact that *nothing* can replace my Powerbook). But I'd definitely like to experiment with it and see how feasible it would be as a backup workstation... or maybe a really inexpensive box I could pair a grunt up with (maybe even a Windows grunt?) The geek gland throbs.