Linux on Roads Less Taken

Ubuntu Just Works

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine is having a less optimal experience with Linux, and I realized I could jot down my experience for the last few years.

I have been using Linux on my desktop for a long time now, about 10 years I think. Early I played “distro jumping” and used Lunar Linux for quite some time on my older Zepto laptop.

But at some point I just decided that, nah, source distros are huge time sinks. Not necessarily because they have issues, but because they are fun to tinker with. I also felt it was “smarter” to know a mainstream Linux well, so I decided to go for “least friction”, and moved to Ubuntu. When Unity hit I did contemplate using something else, at least an alternative shell, but decided to just “hang in there”, and now I tend to like it. Recently I upgraded to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS , it was pretty eventless.

Going virtual from CLI

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently when I automated a development process I looked deeper at managing virtual environments and ended up using two really nice tools complementing VirtualBox in a slick way - Vagrant and Veewee . A lot of us use VirtualBox of course, but getting a new Ubuntu box up is still a bit of blablablabla… What if it could be done all from the command line and easily automated?

HyperDex on Ubuntu 12.10 from source

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So ok, I really like looking at new interesting NoSQL databases. Up until yesterday I felt Riak was the most interesting one (have also coauthored Phriak - a Riak binding for Pharo Smalltalk ) but after an evening of discussing choices of key/value backends for the Oak project I decided to “google a bit” and stumbled upon HyperDex .

New SSD for my Lenovo X220

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After the conundrum with my Intel 320 SSD I did some googling and decided to invest a fair chunk of money in a really good SSD - the Samsung 840 Pro, 512GB . The 840 Pro seems to be the king of the hill right now and it’s only 7mm thick which is what I need for my X220 (although people have shoved 9mm drives into it with a bit of force).

Never an Intel SSD again

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I bought my Lenovo X220 - which I have been extremely pleased with to date - I chose an Intel 320 160Gb SSD disk with it, in retrospect a BAD MISTAKE. No idea why I didn’t find the warnings plastered all over the net at the time, and the problem was even acknowledged by Intel as early as july 2011 . The disk has been working fine since april when I got it, until the last day of 2012…