Anyone unlucky enough to have read anything in my blog before knows I’ve been a long-time Linux user.  I’ve had various Linux servers and now have a couple of Linux virtual machines on the ‘net hosting these pages.  I’ve flirted in the past with Linux based desktops, but for various reasons never made a solid effort to give up Windows.  Mostly that’s because there were a handful of things I wanted that I could still only really get from Windows.  Games primarily, and that’s still the case today.  Lord of the Rings Online might run on Linux under WINE, but since I have a valid XP license and my machine runs it quite happily already, why go to the bother?

However, the list of apps that I do need and only come with Windows has shrunk considerably.  I made the switch to OpenOffice a while back (both at home and work), and although the paragraph numbering pisses me off a great deal, I’m happy enough with the applications.  I don’t play any other PC games any more (other than Flash based stuff) because we got the PS3 and so that has removed a huge chunk of Windows reliance.  Just about anything else I do is either a web app (mail) or there are plenty of Linux apps that cover it (Usenet, browsing, etc.)

So I thought I’d make a solid effort to use Ubuntu and see how I really get on with it.  But I don’t really want a dual boot system until I know for sure I’m going to migrate my data to Linux and only boot into Windows to play LOTRO.  So I’m running Ubuntu in a VirtualBox VM, running Full Screen with Bridged Networking and ignoring Windows in the background.  The VM has ~1GB of memory and plenty of CPU (especially for Linux) so performance isn’t an issue.  The only question is really can I find the apps and a way of working that I’m comfortable with.

I’ve been setting this up for two days and already there’s been some pain.

• Looks like NAT networking in VirtualBox 3.1.4 is hosed.  I started browsing and downloading various things yesterday and every now and then a web page wouldn’t load, and I’d need to click refresh a few times.  Then I installed a Usenet client (XPN, very nice) and it would randomly hang getting headers.  Took me a while to realise there was a problem, but since this is a Debian based distribution the investigation was trivial – sudo apt-get install wireshark; sudo wireshark.  Tracing the network traffic it was obvious the client was losing packets and there was a lot of bright red ACK’ing and re-ACK’ing going on.  I checked online and there were reports of VirtualBox NAT being broken a few sub-releases ago but being fixed now.  Well, it’s clearly not fixed, however Bridged networking seems (so far) to work fine.  Sadly, this caused me serious frustration yesterday and earlier today while I was trying to download and install various apps.
• Finding a replacement for Twhirl (Twitter Client).  I could of course, still use Twhirl which is an Adobe AIR app and so runs under Linux.  However, support for Twhirl has been dropped and I hate the replacement (too big!).  So I scouted about and found Gwibber.  Sadly, it suffers from the major problem with a lot of open source apps, crap documentation.  Yes I know, it’s open source and so I can fix this myself, but it doesn’t help when you’re first trying to get it installed and working.  So, the current package is buggy, but I worked around that and got it running, then I couldn’t get any themes to work until I found they’d changed the theme system and none of the ones found by Google worked.  Then I found there was a theme package you could apt-get install and it was all okay.  But now in order to run it, I have to launch it twice from the menu, I’m sure I’ll get that worked out.
• USB support – not critical, but I did manage to blue screen my entire machine today trying to get USB devices to show up inside the VM.  I might try again later, would be nice if I ever need to move data around (although I do have a shared folder, so I can leave stuff on the Windows partition).

Some things worked really well,

• Pidgin, it’s just excellent.  The plugins are great, and GFire especially useful since I can hang out in the XFire channel with friends.
• I loved apt-get the first time I used it, and I still love it now (even if it’s called something else )

Some things are okay, but could be better,

• Picasa works under Linux, but only because it runs with the WINE libraries.  When I first ran it, I had some issues but that might be due to the network problems I was having at the same time.  Annoyingly, because it’s running in WINE it looks like a Windows XP app, which bugs me because if I’ve switched to Ubuntu I want it to look like a Gnome app.  But hell, at least it runs; Picasa was the one major app I would miss other than LOTRO.
• After being a Windows desktop user for a very, very long time, a lot of the shortcut keys I’m used to (such as shift-num-pad-1 to select everything on a line) don’t work, and those are going to be the things that take me longest to get used to.

I’ve promised myself that if I’m just sitting at the computer, I’ll use the Ubuntu VM.  If I’m playing LOTRO I’ll close it down to free up resources, but return to it once I’m done.  I have a couple of other options.  Wubi looks very interesting, it installs Ubuntu into a single file under Windows, and adds a boot option for it on the Windows boot menu.  It installs like a Windows app, and you can uninstall it again afterwards.  When you boot into Ubuntu the Windows partition is mounted so you can share files.  The other option is a straight install and dual-boot into it’s own partition (but I’d need to do some partition shrinking to get there).  Until I know for certain I want to move, I’ll stick with the VM, since it gives me the quickest way to get into LOTRO and back out again.

I suppose the only question I haven’t answered is why I want to move?  Unlike some, I don’t hate Windows (although I still use XP so maybe that’ll come), and I think that Microsoft is no worse that many major software vendors.  I think I just like the idea of software being free and available for anyone to use, improve and share.  Certainly in the next 10 years the face of computing is going to change radically and I’d rather the stuff I use be driven by the people who use it, than the people who want to make money selling it to us.

Bright sunny day.  Wouldn’t say it was warm, but the sun is pleasant if you’re out of the breeze and not in shade.  More importantly, it’s dry, so I finally got a chance to get back into the garden and finish up what we started last year before I had the hernia.

Time to get rid of the deck (once and for all!)  It’s been piled up at the bottom of the garden since last year, so the wood’s in pretty bad shape now.  Some of it is still too long to go into the car though, so this morning I’ve been moving it to the side of the house and sawing the bits that aren’t going to fit.  I’ve moved about a third, and since this is the first physical exercise I’ve had since winter set in, I’m taking it slow!  Here’s how we left it in 2009.

Moved around a third of it to the side of the house, and cut some of the longer beams.

But it doesn’t look like that much has changed yet in the garden!

Total number of amphibians re-homed during this process: 1 (running total)

March.

Time Marches On.  March brings a few things.  It adds another year to both myself and Grete as we have birthdays.  And it brings a round of diabetic checkups (my yearly assessment).  As always, I’m expecting the worst from the blood glucose numbers, and assume I’ll be blind and missing limbs in a few months due to bad sugar control.  We’ll see what the numbers return.

I’m trying to remain upbeat about being almost 40, but with the all crap going on at work, that’s never easy.

Grete’s running another book give away on BookThing.  Take a look, and let people know.  Seven copies of Black and White by Jackie Kessler & Caitlin Kittredge up for grabs.

So, another go at pease pudding last night – no photo this time.  Used a much smaller amount of split peas, an in general, it’s much better.  For a start, it tastes like the pease pudding my mam used to make, and it’s mostly smooth and creamy.  We had to push it through a sieve to get it like that though.  Need to cook the split peas for longer, and not quite so tightly packed together (the ones in the middle were still mostly raw).  But in general, we’re getting closer!

I’m considering just putting the gammon joint into water, with the split peas loose, and boiling it until the peas go soft, and then straining the water away (for stock), rather than putting the peas in muslin.

So a friend reports Coke Zero in bottles is back in Tesco in Ipswich, and my wife told me it’s back in one Tesco in Nottingham as well.

Will we ever know what really happened?

Does anyone really care?

Anyway, good news for those of us who like the drink!

So we’ve crawled, wrapped in our fleece blankets and new hats, out of the freezing white bitter cold of December into the wet miserable damp grey cold of January.  We’ve managed to stay above freezing for a week or so, but it doesn’t make it any more pleasant out there.  I’m no lover of sun, I don’t like bright lights and never have, but I’d rather have the white cold of snow than the grey murk of whatever-it-is-we-have now.  Soon though it’ll be spring (and as we get older, the seasons come and go faster, so it’ll be spring before we know it and autumn will be fast approaching with summer just a hint of heat in the middle), and hopefully we’ll get out and get the outside of the house sorted a bit.

Woodwork, holes in the walls, the garden – that’s this years focus I feel.

So it seems to be true.  Tesco (in the UK) has decided to stop stocking Coke Zero.  We noticed they didn’t have any and asked customer service, and they couldn’t find a re-order entry.  A few days later a friend said their Tesco (completely different part of the country didn’t have any either).  I checked their online grocery website (tesco.com) and true enough, no Coke Zero available there.

I e-mailed and phoned, and eventually got a reply from a guy saying he’d spoken to their buying department, and they had decided to stop carrying Coke Zero.  He couldn’t explain why, and didn’t understand why, but there you have it.

So now we’re buying our Coke Zero from Asda, and we may end up shopping there more often as a result rather than going to do supermarkets.  Tesco fail?

Edit: Let me know (in the comments) if your local Tesco is / isn’t stocking Coke Zero and if you’ve been able to find out why.

I’m a LoveFilm subscriber and I wanted to rent Public Enemies.  However, it’s not been available on LoveFilm since it was released, always listed as just unavailable for rent.  Keep that in mind.  I have four lists on LoveFilm, Movies, TV, Wish List and Comedy.  Movies are stuff we want LoveFilm to send right now and likewise TV is the list we use to get the next disc in whatever TV series we’re watching.  The Wish List and Comedy lists have no discs next to them – so LoveFilm doesn’t dispatch anything from those lists.  They’re reminders of things we might want.

Back to the first point.  I wrote to LoveFilm to ask them why they didn’t have Public Enemies.  They replied and said they were having issues with their supplier, sounds like bollocks but okay, fair enough.  They also said, here have a free disc! Cool I thought, although let’s face it, it doesn’t cost them any money.

So I checked, and there was no sign of my new disc allocation.  And I waited.  I wanted to put the new disc next to the Movies list so they sent something to watch.

Later that day I received an e-mail telling me they’d dispatched something, but it was something from the Wish List.  Disappointing I thought.  Because I was sure you were supposed to be able to pick where the free disc came from, and I assumed I’d just missed something.

Anyway, I sent them another mail to thank them but say that it was a little frustrating that they had dispatched something without letting me pick the list, since the Wish List they used isn’t something I wanted a movie from right at that moment.

They replied, they were very sorry, to compensate me for my trouble they had given me a free disc!

Which I had no way of allocating to a particular list that I could find.

And so they dispatched something else I don’t really want to watch from the Wish List.

I believe this, my friends, is the true definition of irony (in combination with a battery powered battery power checker they make a wonderful couple).

Click for the full size image, which I think you might need to do, to read the text.