Solo Technology

Posted on June 30, 2008   5 Comments

For the past week I’ve been using Ubuntu (via the Install Inside Windows option) almost full-time on my home machine. I’m digging it so far and am thinking I’ll re-install it as dual-boot to get a bit more performance (although it really runs quite well as the Windows Install as a perk of being on a Raptor hard drive).

I’ve had a few challenges along the way, but nothing too awful yet.

Smooth Fonts

The first couple days I feared going blind, but I finally stumbled over the Fonts tab in the “Appearance Options” settings. Switching over to the “Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)” and then going into Details and setting Hinting to Full has really eliminated all the initial pixelation/jaggies that were driving me nuts.

My article from 2 years ago on font smoothing (Smooth Fonts for Ubuntu) wasn’t quite as effective this time around — but now there’s a control panel thingy, so it’s all good.

Printing

My next challenge was printing. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems printing to the attached (and rather old) HP 6110 multifunction printer. But when this same machine is running Windows that printer is shared out to all the other home machines.

I installed the Samba stuff and was easily able to share the printer so that the Windows machines all see it. Seemed easy enough at first…

However, when those other home machines connect to the printer they all complain about drivers. So I created a shared directory containing the HP 6110 printer drivers.

But still no dice — now Windows tells me that those drivers don’t match the printer. So I dunno what sort of printer Windows thinks it is, but I’m going on to plan B for this one.

Plan B: Attach printer to wife’s XP machine and share it out. I’m quite confident I’ll be able to print to it from Ubuntu and I already know the other Windows machines won’t have issues.

Remote Access to Work

I have an “ops” machine at work that I use whenever I’m remote. Once connected to that machine I can access the rest of my world and I have several different ways of getting to it.

I have yet to figure out how to create a VPN connection to my Cisco VPN concentrator at the office. I’m sure it’s incredibly simple and I’m just a moron, but whatever. I tabled that though since I have two other options: LogMeIn Free and Hamachi. Interesting that those are now both part of the LogMeIn family of products…

The LogMeIn Free software client is running on my ops machine. Via the wonders of their Firefox extension I can have smooth and responsive remote control access to that machine from any of my others — except this Ubuntu install. For some reason I can NOT get the bloody extension to install in Firefox 3 under Ubuntu (more details in my recent Twitter for Support? article). I need to contact the LMI folks to see if they have ideas.

As an aside, I installed Firefox for Windows with Wine. Works tolerably well, but it can’t do SSL sites without blowing up. Apparently this is a known issue. Same issue with Opera 9.5 under Wine too.

As another aside: I was happy to note how much easier it is to install stuff with Wine these days! Last time around (several years back) it was still a bit arcane…

Fortunately, Hamachi works just fine. I grabbed the Linux client and got the Ubuntu machine added into my “ops network” of machines. Once connected I can use the Terminal Services Client to easily connect to that ops machine and manage my network and servers for work.

With Hamachi working, I next grabbed gHamachi to get a GUI on the Hamachi stuff as it is all command line action. Initially I had no luck. It would start up and then *poof* disappear in a cloud of error messages. Revisiting the site and looking closer at the bottom of the page, I noticed a newer “beta” update from last year on this forum page that works very nicely. It even iconizes to the notification tray when minimized.

Blogging Clients

I’m disappointed with what I’ve found for blogging client options. I’m just too spoiled with Windows Live Writer I suppose.

Conclusion

As I write I realize I’m actually very close to being able to go full time linux at home now. In the past I couldn’t quite do it because of some ties to Windows-only programs (like QuickBooks). Now, however, I can’t think of any ties…

I would still have to have Windows around, but I could easily do that with something like VMware and an XP install — just to have a place for my Visual Studio (and SQL Server) Express installs and, of course, Windows Live Writer.

Hmmm… I’ll keep running it for another week or two and ponder that a bit. I’d probably have to keep a dual-boot option for XP or Vista though — I need to be prepared for Diablo III!

Tags: firefox, fonts, ghamachi, hamachi, linux, LogMeIn, printing, remote-desktop, SSL, Ubuntu, vmware, vpn, Windows, windows-live-writer

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