Time flies when you’re having fun, and I’ve certainly been having fun with Ubuntu recently. Looking back through my (not very frequent) posts, I see it’s been about 6 weeks 6 months! since I posted about installing Ubuntu as a test on my new laptop.

Since then, I can, quite literally, count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve booted back into Windows Vista. At the moment the Vista partition (all 20Gb of it!) serves to provide me with printing capabilities (My printer is an old Dell USB one that only barely works under Vista), and to update my iPod with some purchased music (Teeny Shiny and Bambi’s Dilemma by Melt Banana)

I have no reason or need to run Windows Vista on my laptop, and has been proven over the past four months, there is no reason I need to run Windows for work either. It’s turning out that the only reason I actually have a Windows desktop at all is to act as my games machine, since this is the one area that Linux is deficient. Whilst I know that a lot of games can run quite happily under WINE or through Cedega’s service, not all do. So for now, I have one Windows machine running XP (which will never have Vista installed on it), and one laptop running Ubuntu.

Going back to the work comment, for the past 4 months I’ve been working for as Head of Web Development for Hachette Filipacchi, the publisher of Elle Magazine, Red Magazine and Ideal Home amongst others. During that entire period I’ve been running a dual monitor desktop running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (well, until recently when I did a dist-upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon). The only time I’ve had some trouble is with project management software, which I rarely need anyway. There was nothing I needed that was Windows only. As a quick rundown, here’s the most common software in use in the office, and what I replaced it with.

Microsoft Exchange
Replaced with Evolution (through a webmail connection). Whilst it’s possible to connect to an Exchange server through IMAP, the IT department weren’t comfortable with that.

Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Visio
Replaced with Open Office, and no-one noticed. I now use Open Office exclusively.

Tortiose SVN+PSPad
Replaced with Eclipse+Subclipse+PHPEclipse. I’m finding the move to an IDE to have been beneficial, rather than just using a text editor. Combining Eclipse with a local copy of Apache+PHP+MySQL means I can do all my web development on my local machine, and use Subversion to store the code, and later publish to the live webserver in a managed way. Very handy.

MSN Messenger
Replaced with Pidgin, although there was also the option of Meebo, and to deal with some firewall issues I also wrote my own web-based chat app.

Photoshop
Replaced with The Gimp. This is perhaps the most contentious issue for some people, since whilst The Gimp isa good piece of software, it is certainly not in the same league as Photoshop when it comes to image manipulation. That said, since I’m not a designer and only use The Gimp to resize images, and perhaps create some spot graphics, it’s not an issue for me.

Winamp
Replaced with Amarok.

Filezilla
Replaced with… Filezilla. Yep, there’s a native port of Filezilla available for Linux, and recent releases have made it as stable as the Windows version of the software.

The Bat
Replaced with Firebird. I think Firebird still a little ways to go to be as useful as The Bat, but I find it quite suitable as a mail client.

That pretty much covers everythign I need on a day to day basis. Having direct access to a command shell also helps tremendously when developing websites, and I can connect to the webserver very quickly. Running Ubuntu also makes it extremely easy to install and maintain a local web development environment, so I actually do all my development directly on my desktop under Apache 2, PHP5 and MySQL5. Once I’ve done my coding, I can simply commit to my SVN repository and then check out the code directly to the live webserver. Makes developing complex websites very easy!

One perhaps under mentioned aspect of running Ubuntu (or many other Linux distributions for that matter) that I have found remakably useful - and something I actively miss when using a Windows machine - is multiple workspaces. For example, on my laptop I have four workspaces arranged in a 2×2 grid, and I can place windows within a particular workspace to organise them into logical work groups.

On my work machine, whilst I had two monitors, I retained the four workspaces (although I also ran Compiz Fusion, so I had the 3D cube rather than a 2×2 grid), again allowing me to group windows together into logical workspaces. So I would have one workspace for email clients, one for research, one for development (Eclipse, local web browser, editors etc) and so on.

The new version of Ubuntu is due for release tomorrow, and having been using it for the past few weeks, I think this is the next major step forward for Linux - it does just work.

As a last note, a lot of people I have spoken to claim that it’s almost impossible to get support for Linux, which is why they don’t use it. I did some checking, and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, provides commercial support for Ubuntu via email and telephone - and you can buy support for an entire YEAR for £150…