Another 2 Windows apps bite the dust and i shuffle over to linux, this time its windows remote control, down to rdesktop,
It has lots of nice and expected options, i use the following in a taskbar icon

“rdesktop -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD -0 SERVERNAME:3389”

the “-0” is the same as “/console”

And also “super cat” down to “Removable media catalog management”, does what it says on the tin, no further details needed (i use if for keeping a list of the files i have on my NAS)

Ok, before i start, this is not a political entry, i don’t care about fan boys or purists, I’m just a contractor earning a living hopefully without the users shouting at me too much, so on that basis lets begin:

For some time Domino has been a dirty word, i don’t know why, perhaps MS did a good job of blackening it during the 90’s exchange wars, or people don’t like the look and feel, i just don’t know, i do know that when you mention it in a lot of corporate environments in the context of making a new app, the room is suddenly filled with frowning managers and someone mutters the word ‘Legacy’, on the flip side if you build the app and thanks to domino its working, secuire and in in record time, for little extra cost, no one minds, thus is the nature of the corporates.

Now one of my major clients is building a monster new app and they are using the following

Java 1.5
Ant 1.7.1
Spring Framework 2.5.5
Spring Facelets 2.0.3
Spring Webflow 2.0.3
Spring Javascript (Dojo) 2.0.3
Hibernate 3
Websphere 6.1

All very nice and sexy, but no domino, i was asked which of the list could be provided by domino i came up with this

Java 1.5 (in Domino 8.0+)
Ant 1.7.1 (packaged no, not really, we use .ntf’s)
Spring Framework 2.5.5 (Sure)
Spring Facelets 2.0.3 (A version of JSF is in Xpages i think)
Spring Webflow 2.0.3 (Dont Know)
Spring Javascript (Dojo) 2.0.3 (yup, and built in in version 8.5)
Hibernate 3 (yup)
Websphere 6.1 (use domino)

looking at it I’m quite pleased, domino seems to be keeping up nicely, then i have another think, is IBM just trying to keep domino up to date? or are we back to the year 2000~ times when domino was going to be a websphere bolt on sooner or later and they are just doing it an a gentle way this time, baseless rumor, and ultimately pointless from my point of view, as IT’ers we cycle our skill sets every 2 years, but one thing i know, the next year is gonna be a fab one for learning new stuff regardless of if your a domino fan boy or a Websphere Conny and in the end we will all be code Gods.

The thought last week was, F**king Lacie, the bloody thing has gone and died, one Lacie big disk 1 TB had snuffed it, taking with it a huge chunk of thankfully replaceable data, sooo, time to bite the bullet and get a Drobo, i cant afford it, and should not get it, but this is the second drive i have lost in the last month and i need RAID (or what ever it uses), one surf latter and its off to Scan I go, (they were the cheapest, had it in stock and also had a special offer on good reliable 1TB drives)

2 days pacing (and frantic downloading), and it arrives, there are hundreds of normal reviews and deboxing views out there, so here is the points that the other reviews seems to miss

The dashboard app that you REALLY need (ignore what they say, its got all the groovy functionality in it), does not work on Linux, not under wine and not even under vmware (yes it loads and everything but it does not find the drobo, and i tried it in both bridged and natted modes, also it does not allow you to specify and IP address to connect to), so i go crawling to my beloved and beg the use of her XP machine (STOP SNIGGERING!!!), i had also got the Droboshare, as its currently the only way to support EXT3 with out a whole lot of farting around (it can support 2 Drobo units to 1 Drobo Share) and anywhere theres is something groovy about NAS’s rather than SANS.

Anyway, after that, is really was a doddle to setup (it also tootled of to the net and did all the firmware and such), and suddenly i had 3.8 gig of safe data space (broken up into 2TB chunks), you can rename the drives and everything, some extra notes:

1) its not too slow, i get 19Meg Sec, on normal USB drives and the same on this, and about 7-10Meg Sec on network transfer, so you can stream moves just fine.

2) its does not like surprises, ie it takes a while to warm up once it has fallen asleep, and if you suddenly do something it does not like (say attempt to transfer 1.5TB), it wants a little sulk and a quiet 5 mins to flash its lights, and don’t just turn it off (you don’t lose any data, but it acts like someone has nicked its teddy bear)

3) it knows best, even the instruction book says to leave it alone so it can sort it self out and do thing, and each time i have tried to intervene when it was taking longer than i wanted, i have just made it worse, and it simpler to just go and have a shower.

4) its bleeding quiet, nuff said

(clicking sound attacts the scums attention, and he scuttles off for 10 mins), Phew, back, my other lacie drive must have heard the swearing as it started making a very nasty clicking sound, and stoped responing, i tell you that company hates my guts, after a franting few mins i got it working by taking it to bits and spreading the parts out on paper in the cold outside (dear lord dont let it rain tongiht) and its talking to me again, backup BACKUP!!!,

back to the drobo, all in all an excellent bit of kits and well worth it if you have a couple of Terabytes of data you really don’t want to loose, and dont want to waste you money on lacie drives.

My grief!!, hundreds of updates, for Linux and fire fox out at once and all their supported bits and bobs triggered a 200Meg update via the update manager, most things squeaked and squawked at the sudden change , most frightenley VMWARE would not load, but top tip of the day, if a Linux app will not load, run it in terminal and it will normally make plain its grievance and tell you what to do to fix, this all my apps have done (phew!!) and we are back up and running, but time to make another ghost style image (curtasey of Part Image and the system rescue cd)

Recently i decided to make the jump from Windows to linux for all my kit rather than just a few select bits, this was strangely driven by Apple, i altered the volume setting on my apple so that i could make my ear drums bleed (I worship at the altar of happy hardcore), this went fine, until i plugged it back into itunes, and it stated quite flatly that i had altered my ipod and that it would wipe it, no cancel button no “are you sure” , nothing, nada, big brother knows best, right then Jobs you git!!! (sound of IPOD being punted across a room), im off to get a new media player (but that’s a subject for another blog),

This led to a complete hissy fit against all the big players. (damn them all to hell, if i wanted my computer to do that i would tell it to!!)

So new laptop in hand, i download the latest ubuntu and began, the following is the things i have learned from the experience, with the windows to linux software alternatives.

1) BUY VMware, yes i know its $200 per Host version, but if your doing it on a professional basis it is so worth it.

2) Download the VMware converter (its free), then using it take a vmware image of you existing installation, this means that you have all you old stuff with you and can be using all your old software, no licence keys lost, no discovery that there is no equivalent software on linux, its totally the soft option. and the more you use it the more you love it (yes i know virtual box is supposed to be faster, but quite frankly I’m looking for reliability here)

3) On you vmware box enable shared folders then basically have a drive mapped to your “home” folder, this means that you can use this as your common store (it should be known that you WILL get some file location problems when you do this for things like the lotus data directory, as linux is case sensitive on file names and there seems no consistency even in big programs like on whether they are looking for “data” , “DATA” or “Data”)

Software Alternatives:

Windows: My Eclipse
Linux: My Eclipse
Comment: Duh!!!, but i have noticed that if you’re sharing your workplace on a share folder between my old VMware windows version and the new linux version, there is some case issues on the directory names

Windows: Lotus notes
Linux: Lotus Notes
Comment: well not quite, it’s supposed to be here in 8.5, so not quite there, but have sacrificed a goat to the great yellow god

Windows: Mame32 (its an arcade emulator for the heathens out their)
Linux: Loemu on top of SDLMame
Comment: exactly the same even my logistic usb controllers work

Windows: Total Recorder (a stream ripper for radio)
Linux: streamripper (i kid you not its actually called that)
Comment: command line instead of gui, but so easy to use its embarrassing

Windows: FLashFXP (simply the best FTP client)
Linux: FileZilla
Comment: Q handling not quite as good but the best linux one that i have found so far

Windows: Outlook
Linux: Google Mail for domains
Comment: yes i know i should be using domino, but quite frankly i just want it to work, on my own mail i just want to be a user, so sue me,

Windows: Office
Linux: Open Office
Comment: yeah yeah symphony, again this is a core app and i just want to be a user

Windows: msn/sametime
Linux: pidgin
Comment: it works and its already on there, I’m happy

Windows: Better File Rename
Linux: Bulk Update
Comment: a fab improvement enabling me to use regular expressions to strip out stuff i don’t want

Windows: The Rest of the Stuff
Linux: VMWARE
Comment: i just works, even audio ripping tools like “sound taxi”

on the whole I’m very pleased, and have no wish to go back.