But no. Half an hour spent judiciously pruning software in Synaptic, and some minor config file tweaking later, and I’m back up with a lithe, almost pristine system. And with no time-consuming reinstalling and reconfiguring, not to mention the lack of stress I always get when I hit the continue button after repartitioning. Even if I know I’m all backed up and have done all I need to, I always suffer the heebie-jeebies after OK’ing that “You do know that all of your data is about to be destroyed? All of it?” dialog.

Long and short - I’m keeping on top of my game and actually quite enjoying not stressing about the system I’m using. I’ve also started to look at Linux home recording stuff ready to write and play some new songs. More on that anon.

Now I’m starting to get a little jealous of her new project and I’m starting to think what I can do as a new craft-based hobby. I do a lot of programming work, which I find very creative, and I still take a fair few photos, but I don’t do a lot with my hands. I’d like a good solid craft hobby that I can get started on, something involving some skill that will take a while to get good at, but I don’t fancy knitting or needlework or anything like that. Any ideas?

I checked out a new working version to use with my live database and was appalled at how slow the app had become. Loading the home page with around 100 tasks was taking a couple of seconds on my local machine; much slower than it had been before I refactored. I did some quick testing and saw that the delay was increasing with the number of projects and actions displayed.

First port of call, make sure the database indexes were set up right. All looked ok, apart from a couple of indexes that were now useful with the query chanegs I had made. Fixed these, but no dice.

Secondly, set up XDebug to pump out some profiling information, and use KCacheGrind to have a look. Not much I didn’t know, but confirmation that the time was all being taken in instantiating and displaying project and action objects. A brief look didn’t show anything up so I decided to leave it and come back to debug the paths through the app in Komodo when I had a bit more time. Very annoyed that my lovely, modular, readable, extendable code was behaving badly like this.

This morning I noticed that a page on our intranet was really taking along time to load, and saw a message in the status bar about bit.ly. Hmm. A quick trip to the Firefox add-ons window, and one uninstalled plugin later - all is fine. The page snaps up in super-quick time, and all is well. Lesson learned - test web apps in Firefox with all plugins turned off, and have confidence that the code I produce is good-quality code.

I have been wallowing in self-pity here for a while, wringing my virtual hands and boring visitors with tales of my computer-based indecision. All of which has distracted me from the business of actually Getting Things Done. We now move on…

Firstly:

1. I am using Ubuntu because that is what I have used for a while and it gave me a good route in to GNU/Linux and FLOSS
2. I want to ‘do the right thing’ and support free software.
3. I am concerned about where Canonical is taking Ubuntu (see this article and the follow-up post and comments for a better discussion than I could hope to give here).

Conclusion: Ditch Ubuntu, install a free distro and build up from there.

Corollary: I will, realistically, have to use Windows at work if I do this.

Secondly:

1. I’m lucky that my work allow me to use my own laptop at work, and that I can choose to use GNU/Linux on that laptop.
2. Ubuntu does everything I need to work effectively at work, except use Outlook for email.
3. The totally free distros that I’ve tried don’t, at least not without a fair bit of time spent configuring them (leaving aside issues of having to work with other folks proprietary formats and programs).
4. I can’t do the configuring at home as I need to be in the work environment to be able to check that the configuration actually works.
5. Time spent configuring is time spent not working.

Conclusion: I can’t work effectively enough with a totally free system, I should stick with Ubuntu.

Corollary: I can carry on using Linux at work if I do this.

Clearly I should keep using Ubuntu and be able to use Linux at work and home. I’m convinced this is the best conclusion, and it’s one I have come to before, but I still feel a nagging doubt that I want to go with conclusion 1. This is where the title of the post kicks in, and where my solution has made itself apparent.

I will offset my ‘proprietary footprint’ in the same way that people offset their carbon footprint. For every proprietary app I have to use, for every closed-format file I have to save, I will donate some code, write some documentation, or evangelise to one more person about FLOSS. It’s time to stop thinking of just me and my setup and to think about being part of the wider community. There are clearly lines to be drawn, and I will always choose the free solution over the proprietary one where I have a real choice. But where that choice is taken away, by IT rules, by having to collaborate where others use non-free tools and files, I will use the non-free, but try and give back to the free community as much as I take away.

This is more positive than being wholly-free myself but not giving anything back to the community, which is where I think I would have ended up if I hadn’t spent so long pondering this. Ideally I’d do both, but I don’t live in an ideal world - this idea feels like a step in the right direction.

• Want to boot Ubuntu to a text prompt and then start X when I need it
• Can’t find an easy way to do it as they seem to have changed the boot process to avoid using inittab
• Throw all my toys out of the pram at The Injustice Of It All
• Wipe my machine and spend a whole weekend getting Arch to work, booting nicely to a text prompt
• Blog about my new found freedom
• Take an hour installing and setting up the software I need to get Arch to boot to a graphical log-in as I’m fed up of the text one

Granted, I know a lot more about Linux than I did before I started, but that’s another few hours lost that I could have spent improving my Python or PHP skills, or writing a chapter of my novel, or sorting out some of my photos, or any one of the other hundred things on my to-do list. And I could have done any of those on any of the distros I’ve tried in the last year.

I just read a post about a proposed addition to Ubuntu 10.04 - Ubuntu’s integrated music service. This sounds pretty good to me. Additionally, I can see that it might start to make people think about, at the very least, giving Linux a try. So far so just-what-it-says-in-the-link. My thought is really about the burden on a user such as myself when things like this happen. Why? Read on.

When I was a Mac user it didn’t really matter what I said about them as Apple’s marketing machine was quite capable of swaying opinion without my help. Ditto for Microsoft (the effectiveness or otherwise of the Jerry ‘n’ Bill ads notwithstanding). With Ubuntu I feel it does make a difference what I, and all other Linux users, say and do. If someone looks over my shoulder on the train and sees me using Gnome on Ubuntu they would probably be interested to find out what this non-Windows thing I was using was. If they see me using the Awesome WM under Arch Linux they will probably shake their head and look the other way at what a luddite I am. It doesn’t matter if I know that the command line is more pwerful, or that getting rid of distractions and unnecessary processes makes I and my laptop more productive. People will want a free alternative if it looks like something they already know.

At my old job I was running openbox. All was set up nicely except that I had to drop to the command line to connect to a Windows share. Someone came over and asked to see a document, I popped up a terminal to connect to the server and retireve the document and they said (in essence), “this is so much harder than using Windows, why bother”. Forget the fact that it was actually quicker to go from start to open document, forget the fact that all the software I was using was free, this was ‘harder to do’. Had I popped up Nautilus and clicked on the shared drive and browsed down to the file like I would have on Windows, I’m sure the impression I’d given would have been that it was at least as easy as Windows. And it’s free!? Sign me up.

Because of distros like Ubuntu, Linux is making ground. I’ve had quite a few people say, ‘oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to try that out’ when I’ve mentioned I use Linux. I’m pretty sure they meant Ubuntu, and I’ve always straight away arranged to get them a CD to try it out.

My overall question is - as a proponent of Linux, and someone who will happily bang on about it to others, what pressure is there on me to use a distro like Ubuntu? Is it something in the makeup of a Linux user that makes them try and make life hard for themselves or is that just me? Ubuntu does all I need and more so why don’t I be a good global citizen and use it, help to promote it, make it visible? I think its the ‘and more’ that puts me off (see last post about Arch), but I don’t think I could really say why I feel the need to economise on RAM, processor use and disk space when I have more than enough to spare.

I’m not really sure what I’m even saying here, but I think there is a sea-change in the offing, and Canonical may well be the ones to boot Linux into contention for once. I’m just not sure what my role in it should be, but I genuinely feel I can play a role in this, something I never felt with Apple or Microsoft. What’s a boy to do?

Enter Arch Linux.

I had tried a VM install of this a while ago but decided to go all the way and do a clean install of it at the weekend. As I am writing this on that system, all geared up to use for work, it obviously has worked. But is it what I had hoped for? Yes it is! The install was actually relatively painless, if time consuming. Ubuntu 9.10 took about an hour from finishing my backup to having a completely clean install running, with all the packages I wanted installed and configured. Arch took more like three or four hours, but I really feel like I’ve built the system I want and, more importantly, I feel like I know how it all fits together. For my money Ubuntu is getting increasingly large-OS-like in its approach — and I’m including Windows and Mac in that — hiding a lot of detail from the user and changing some configuration to be more user-friendly ( for ‘user-friendly’ read ‘hard to understand and different to the way everyone else does it’).

Arch values simplicity in its best form — not meaning ‘dumbed-down’ or ’simplistic’ but meaning that everything works in a consistent way, and that your basic install is minimal but functional. You then add in the components you need to make the system you want to work with. It could be seen as a great distro for beginners, if that beginner is wanting to understand Linux and how to put a truly great and reliable system together, rather than beginning to use Linux because it is an OS that will let them ‘not use Windows’. No snobbery intended here — these are both equally legitimate paths into and through the Linux world. I think of it as being lord of the manor in both cases; with Arch you know where the wiring is, how the plumbing works, and more than a little about the structural stresses and strains of your manor. The Ubuntu manor is just as sturdy and impressive, its just you may need to call in an expert when you want to start making structural changes.

And with that almost supernatural straining of the art of simile, I’ll get back to my work…

Grab the code from here and follow the instructions (they’re in French but pretty easy to follow if you’ve compiled your own software before). Out of the box it recognises .mdtxt files as Markdown files, but I like all my .txt files to be recognised as Markdown too, so I did a bit extra behind my scenes to get this to work.

Setting the association

First thing to do is add the “txt” extension to be recognised as markdown format. Open the file to edit:

gedit /home/nigel/.local/share/mime/packages/x-markdown.xml

then add in the glob pattern for txt files under the current pattern for files so that the file has two lines like this:

<glob pattern="*.mdtxt"/>
<glob pattern="*.txt"/>

Next, remove the txt extension association with plain text. Open the main mime types file (you will probably need to do this as root):

gedit /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml

and search for the line

<glob pattern="*.txt"/>

This should only appear once and will be in the section for ‘plain/text’.

Once you’ve done these steps, run the following two lines of code (the second may need you to be root):

update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime/
update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

then restart Gedit and you’ll be all set!