My Ubuntu Experience
Posted by Brian Clifton
Written April 11, 2009 at 10:56
Written April 11, 2009 at 10:56
I use Linux a lot at work and I'm starting to like it. When it comes to development I still prefer Windows but Linux has definitely gotten much better than when I had first started using it. I'm mostly familiar with Red Hat distributions like Fedora and CentOS so I wasn't sure what to expect when I came across Ubuntu.
http://www.ubuntu.com/
I haven't tried Linux on my home machine since Mandrake 9 came out so I burned a Live CD for 8.04 LTS (desktop) and tried it out on my Shuttle SG33G5. Ubuntu booted up quickly and I honestly liked the look and feel. Even though it appears to be targeted at newbies, there is a huge amount of support online for it. Using it for a few minutes was enough to convince me to jump in and configure my machine for dual booting.
On my home computer I primarily use Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I do a lot of Windows programming at home and really enjoy it. One of the great features built into Vista is the ability to resize your partitions on the fly (before this, you'd have to use a 3rd party tool). After doing some searching, I resized my partition using these notes:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial133.html
Basically you just go into Disk Management in the Computer Management administrative tool. When there you can right click the partition and choose "Resize" to resize the partition as needed. I shrank the disk to allow to reserve approximately 50 gigabytes for Ubuntu.
When I install Linux, I like to use the ext3 filesystem with these partitions:
The first thing I noticed about Ubuntu was that vi was screwed up; it wasn't behaving properly. For example, I would go into insert mode and using the arrow keys would start typing letters. After a little research, I found a fix:
After getting vi squared away, I needed to fix the nVidia drivers. Don't discount the Shuttle SG33G5 because of it's small size; even though it only has a 250 watt power supply, you can comfortably shove in a GeForce 9800GT 16x PCI-Express card.
I found a great article on the Ubuntu forums about getting the driver installed and working.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=862203
After getting the nVidia driver up and running, I figured I would check out Mono. I've been extremely interested in learning more about it, especially given how much C# and .NET development I do. There is a lot of great documentation available on the homepage:
http://monodevelop.com/
You can just open a console window and grab these packages:
Once you do, you can open up MonoDevelop. It has a very similar look and feel to Visual Studio. I made a few quick and dirty C# applications and I am impressed!
http://www.ubuntu.com/
I haven't tried Linux on my home machine since Mandrake 9 came out so I burned a Live CD for 8.04 LTS (desktop) and tried it out on my Shuttle SG33G5. Ubuntu booted up quickly and I honestly liked the look and feel. Even though it appears to be targeted at newbies, there is a huge amount of support online for it. Using it for a few minutes was enough to convince me to jump in and configure my machine for dual booting.
On my home computer I primarily use Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I do a lot of Windows programming at home and really enjoy it. One of the great features built into Vista is the ability to resize your partitions on the fly (before this, you'd have to use a 3rd party tool). After doing some searching, I resized my partition using these notes:
http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial133.html
Basically you just go into Disk Management in the Computer Management administrative tool. When there you can right click the partition and choose "Resize" to resize the partition as needed. I shrank the disk to allow to reserve approximately 50 gigabytes for Ubuntu.
When I install Linux, I like to use the ext3 filesystem with these partitions:
/boot - 100 MB
swap - 2048 MB
/ - rest of available space
The first thing I noticed about Ubuntu was that vi was screwed up; it wasn't behaving properly. For example, I would go into insert mode and using the arrow keys would start typing letters. After a little research, I found a fix:
sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny
sudo apt-get install vim
After getting vi squared away, I needed to fix the nVidia drivers. Don't discount the Shuttle SG33G5 because of it's small size; even though it only has a 250 watt power supply, you can comfortably shove in a GeForce 9800GT 16x PCI-Express card.
I found a great article on the Ubuntu forums about getting the driver installed and working.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=862203
After getting the nVidia driver up and running, I figured I would check out Mono. I've been extremely interested in learning more about it, especially given how much C# and .NET development I do. There is a lot of great documentation available on the homepage:
http://monodevelop.com/
You can just open a console window and grab these packages:
sudo apt-get install monodevelop
sudo apt-get install mono-gmcs
sudo apt-get install automake
Once you do, you can open up MonoDevelop. It has a very similar look and feel to Visual Studio. I made a few quick and dirty C# applications and I am impressed!