endperform.org

I’ve talked a couple of times before about /home, and how important I feel it is to have it as a separate partition. After this week, I wanted to reiterate my stance on this, and here’s why. A coworker wanted to install a different distribution without needing to wipe out the contents of home. Unfortunately for him, he did not have /home as a separate partition, so he had to opt for backing up somewhere beforehand. A few hours later, he came back asking for a hand in setting up a separate home partition. If you’re someone like me that sometimes likes to change the distribution you’re using, or if you rather do a fresh install of the latest Ubuntu, a separate /home directory is the way to go. You can leave all of your documents and files there, install the fresh OS and be ready to go, no need a backup before you start. Now, that doesn’t mean don’t keep a backup of your data somewhere. You should always have a backup somewhere, and I plan to update my Unison HOWTO soon.

Separate /home is also nice when you’re dealing with a multi-drive system and you don’t have a RAID set up. In my old box, I had a pair of 250GB drives, and they were partitioned as such:

Drive 1
100GB - Windows
150GB - Linux (/, /swap)

Drive 2
250GB - Linux (/home, ext3)

Now in this case, if I were to ever upgrade drive 2, it would just entail creating the /home partition and copying the contents, no reinstall of the entire OS would be needed, which is always nice.

As promised, here’s my desktop (click for larger view)

XFCE with compositing, Conky and Avant Window Navigator

Been geeking out the past few nights setting up an old Dell Dimension desktop as the new home fileserver. I decided to install Ubuntu Server edition on it to keep things simple. Within about an hour I had a working machine using LVM and a Samba server installed. It’s easily accessible, and I’m pondering opening up an SSH port to the outside world so I can get back to it. I also installed Lighttpd (my first experience with it) and I have to say it was pretty painless. PHP, mySQL and Cacti are all running happily, and I’m a happy geek.

On my desktop, I decided to try to play with compositing a bit. I installed XFCE (which is what I’m now using at work), turned on compositing effects and installed Avant Window Manager. I kinda like the little dock. It stays out of my way and is very functional. I also have an XFCE panel to the right, which is handling the system tray, time and main menu. I’ll post a screenshot of it shortly.

Something else amazing also happened this past week. My wife, Bethany, decided that she wanted to try Linux out. After a little guidance, she installed Ubuntu herself using Wubi, and has a pretty Gnome desktop complete with compositing and AWN as well. After about two weeks, I’m going to bug her with some questions and repost them here. So far, she seems to be enjoying it a lot, especially the fact that she can change the look of her desktop anytime she feels like it with ease. Score one for Ubuntu!

I tried to give you a fair chance. I installed you on both my work and home machines and used you for a few days, but sadly I’m afraid this might be the end of the road for us, dear KDE. While we’ve been through a lot together, a lot has changed since the 3.5 days. I really don’t want to get into it, but it’s probably for the best that you know why I’m parting ways with you.

You’ve just become too blingy for your own good. You’re not Windows Vista, nor will you ever be, so why try to keep up? While on my higher end desktop you performed OK, you seemed quite sluggish on my work machine. It’s not the latest and greatest, but it seems to run KDE3.5 just fine. Dolphin, your file manager is terribly slow. When I right click for a context menu, there shouldn’t be a 5 second delay in showing it to me. I’m sure there are options somewhere for me to turn that off, but I never had to deal with that before on this box using Gnome or KDE3.5.

Crashing the main GTK application I rely on for work is not a good way to make inroads with me. Granted, you only did this to me on my work box, but regardless it’s something that I cannot soon forgive. There are some other nagging issues, such as when I run a script or program from your “runner” (Alt-F2), you’ll execute it, but when you’re done you whine that you now can’t find the executable. Neat trick, and I’ll file a bug on it if one hasn’t been filed already.

You’re sluggish, I’m sorry to say. That new bling has come at a price, and that price (at least right now) is performance. Yes, my work desktop has integrated graphics, but should that really matter to you? It just seems like you went for the bling and left performance for another day. Unfortunately, these things combined will leave me with no choice but to find something else until a later release, when hopefully you’ll be back to a level where I can use you daily.

I’ve decided to go the Linux in a VM route on my laptop. Yes, I know, bad geek, but I’m willing to take the loss of geek points. My main reasons for switching to this setup is battery life and heat. I know I could spend hours trying to get things tweaked just right, but even so it seems that Vista does a bit of a better job as far as these two categories go. My laptop has enough power that running a VM isn’t going to be a big deal, especially when I can just SSH into my desktop and access just about everything there.

This also means I may post some Windows tips/tricks since I’m going to try to keep this thing running in top shape. I may also review some utilities I’m using as well. While I do prefer Linux, I’m also a fan of using what gets the job done.