Taste of Tech

The Linux Experiment continues, and I realized I haven’t provided an update in a couple weeks.

I LOVE:

• Firefox. It works just as well as it does in Windows. Once I got Flash working, I haven’t had any trouble with it at all. Frankly, this surprised me a bit. I thought there would be more problems than there really are.
• Thunderbird. Same thing. It just works. I can switch back and forth. I can save a message as a draft on the Linux box and open it and finish it on the Windows one. It’s convenient.
• The screen savers. All right, you noticed that productivity slipped very quickly in this list, which should tell you were I’m heading with the post. But the screen savers in Linux have always been wonderful. I’m generally a “plain black screen” kind of guy over on the Windows site, but in Ubuntu I’m changing them every couple days.

I’m INDIFFERENT about:

• Terminal. I’m running Gnome Terminal 2.18.0, for what it’s worth. The translucent background is pretty cool. The fact that I can’t default it to a larger text size isn’t. I was initially very excited about tabbed terminaling, but as it turns out, I don’t ever remember to use them. I also find myself regularly forgetting to shell to my servers as a different user, since I don’t need to specify the user in Putty.
• PDF Handling. I’m using Evince to read PDFs, and it works reasonably well. It seems like I spend a lot of time looking at the “Loading…” graphic. Generating PDFs with GhostScript works okay, but I like the fact that PDF Creator prompts me for a filename in Windows. In Ubutntu, it just sticks a generically named file in my home directory, and I have to go rename it and move it to wherever I want it.

I’m ANNOYED by:

• The Word Processors. I don’t do complicated things with MS Word. Really, I don’t. Sometimes I have headers and footers. Usually I have some clipart. Once in a great while I’ll have a table. I don’t ever use any features that weren’t in Word 97, because that’s when I stopped paying attention to it. But I have NEVER opened ANY word processing document on my Ubuntu box that didn’t need significant reformatting. I tried OpenOffice. I tried AbiWord. I even tried Lotus Symphony (which should tell you how desperate I was). They’re all pretty good at handling Word XP files, but not really good enough. This is especially true if I need to edit something and send it back to a Word user. Honestly, I don’t use Word all that often if it’s something I’m just doing for myself. I’m almost always sharing documents with others.
• I already told you about the spreadsheets. I’ve installed Gnumeric and the aforementioned Symphony, but I have to admit I haven’t tried them. Mostly, I’m afraid that a 15-minute job is going to take all afternoon, and I end up just doing it in Excel.
• Accessing file shares. This shouldn’t be rocket science. All of my servers are running Linux, for crying out loud. But NFS is very messy, and certainly not scalable to more than a few users. SCP and rsync take too long and end up giving me multiple copies of the same file in different locations. On my Windows computer, if I need a file on a share somewhere, I just type it in the location bar. “\\10.1.50.111\offices\alertnow\students.csv” will get me the file I want. I know. People don’t generally do it this way. But it’s quick and easy. The trouble is, even though I have Linux servers, they’re set up to talk to Windows clients. So I have to have Ubuntu pretending to be Windows connecting to what it thinks is a Windows server, but is actually a Linux server pretending to be a Windows server. Messy, and enough to leave me reaching for my flash drive.
• Printing. Again, this is about my experience. I don’t care that I’m using a 15 year old printer. I shouldn’t have to change the resolution to 300 DPI every time I print something with graphics.

I’ve GIVEN UP on:

• Palm syncing. I spent about five hours on it over the course of three days. I have a LifeDrive. It won’t hotsync. If you have a way of making this work, I’m willing to try again, but I’m not interested in spending half a day trying things that might work that I shouldn’t have to do. Given the fact that there are two different applications for handling this, I didn’t expect this to be the problem that it is.
• Audio and Video. It’s not that I can’t get it to work, it’s more that I never really bothered to try. Skype seems to work, but I haven’t tried to subscribe to podcasts or anything.

Where does that leave me? I’m still using it, but I’m far from using it exclusively. Stay tuned…

This is the third installment of my notes on using Linux as a desktop OS. You can catch up in the Desktop Linux category if you’re interested in the background.

Real work kind of got in the way on Friday, and I found myself trying to do some things with OpenOffice on this new Linux box. Basically, the problem was this: I wanted to compare my school district’s per-pupil expenditures for 2006 with those of the other schools in the county. I also wanted to compare our district’s performance index with those same schools.

As a quick aside, Ohio schools have something called a performance index. It’s a number which quantifies how “good” a school is based on the students’ performance on achievement tests. Schools with a high performance index (like ours) can brag about how great they are. Schools with lower performance indexes can point out that it’s not necessarily the only, or even the most effective, way to measure a public school. But I digress….

All of the data I needed is on the Ohio Department of Education web site. They have some reasonably useful tools for extracting all kinds of data about Ohio’s schools. It only took a few minutes to generate a report that has the per pupil expenditures and performance indexes for all of the school districts.

The problem is that this file didn’t have any county information. So I couldn’t just select the ones I needed. I managed to find a separate report that listed all of the school districts with their counties, but this one also had the private schools in it. Without a one-to-one correspondance between the two data sets, the easiest way to combine this data is with a lookup.

No problem. I’ve been down this road before. In Excel, I would use “=vlookup(A1,’[somefile]!somesheet’!$A$1:$C:850,3,0).” Basically, take a look at the value in cell A1. Compare it to the values in the first column of this range on another spreadsheet. If you find it, return the value on the same line from the third column.

I know, I’m getting a little complicated, here. But these are the kinds of things our kids should be able to do.

The first problem I had was that the formula syntax was different. I sort of expected this. While there are functions to do the same things in Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, they’re going to work a little differently. I was really annoyed that OpenOffice uses a semicolon as a parameter delimiter instead of a comma.

I know. I’m whining. But I’ve been using parameter lists since 1988. Everybody uses commas. I’m pretty sure I’ve never done any programming in any language that didn’t use commas, with the exception of shell scripts and DOS batch files, which use spaces. And if I try to open an Excel file, it replaces all the commas with semicolons and just works. So nothing is broken in old files. But it’s still annoying.

The second problem was that the IRNs were in different formats. The IRN is a six-digit numeric code used to uniquely identify each educational institution in Ohio. This was the primary key I was using for the vlookup. I was using two CSV files generated using the same tool on ODE’s web site. In one, OpenOffice treated the IRN as a number. In the other, it was text. Since you can’t compare numbers and text, I wasn’t getting any matches. I worked around this by creating a new column and adding zero to the IRN. This forced it to be a numeric, and I could compare them again.

The next problem was that I couldn’t do lookups across multiple files. There weren’t any errors, I just didn’t get any results when I tried to do it this way. Copying the data from the two spreadsheets into two different sheets in the same file fixed the problem. So now, I was just doing a vlookup from one sheet to another in the same document. That worked well.

So, I got all of the data in one place. Next, I just needed to filter the data, so I only see my county. That was easy enough to do, and it worked pretty much just like Excel. My standard procedure at this point is to copy the filtered data and paste the values into a new sheet. Ultimately, this is the data I want. I don’t care about the formulas and data sources used to get it. I don’t want to worry about links to other sheets or what happens when I re-sort the data, or how things break if I change filter settings. I just want the data itself. In Excel, I do this by copying the data I want and then pasting the values into a new sheet. Paste special is a wonderful thing, and I have to remember to blog about it sometime.

In OpenOffice, there’s no way to do this. Sure, the paste special does have a lot of other neat features that aren’t in Excel, but this isn’t one of them. I worked around it by copying the data, pasting it into a text file, and then copying it back out and pasting it into a new spreadsheet.

After a few simple calculations, I had the data I needed. The whole process took about an hour. Using Excel, it would have taken about 20 minutes. If I do this type of thing once a week (a conservative estimate), that’s a TSPY of -34.67. Granted, I’ll get more efficient at this. Different isn’t necessarily better or worse, it’s just different. But it is a big price to pay for not using Microsoft Office.

By the way, our district spent $9862 per student last year. The district ranked 27th among the 31 school districts in Cuyahoga County, spending 16% less than the county average of $11738. At the same time, the district’s performance index is 106.9. This is the third highest in the county, and 12% above the average of 95.8.

This is part 2 of my Linux journey. See what you’ve missed. 

Ubuntu installed without any problems. Upon restarting, I logged in with the account I configured during the installation. The first order of business was fixing the video settings. I was stuck in 800×600 mode, because the installer didn’t correctly identify my video card. It took a little Googling to get it resolved, but essentially I just needed to tell it to enable the higher resolutions. While it was frustrating, it wasn’t any more of a pain than installing a fresh copy of Windows to find I’m in 640×480x16 mode because it doesn’t have a graphics driver.

Once that was resolved, I moved on to setting up email. I toyed with the idea of using Evolution, but since I’m happy with Thunderbird on Windows, I thought I’d start there. I was pleasantly surprised that the web site auto-detected the OS I was using, and it gave me the right installer.

I was a little confused about where to install it. Normally, on Linux systems, I would put applications in a folder like /var/local. But since I’m not running as root, I don’t have access to that location. There doesn’t seem to be a Linux equivalent to “Program Files,” where regular users can install software. In the end, I created a folder called “apps” in my home directory, and put everything there. I know this may cause problems down the road, but for now, it’ll work.

So I launched Thunderbird, and got the familiar “gee, it looks like you’re new here, would you like to configure an account?” dialog. I didn’t really want to set up all my various email accounts and RSS feeds, so I cheated. On my Windows computer, I found the Thunderbird profile in c:\Documents and Settings\myusername\Application Data\Thunderbird. I copied this folder to the Ubuntu machine, and put it in my home directory. Then, I renamed it “.thunderbird,” launched the program, and it loaded with all of my settings and messages intact. Cool! That just saved about an hour’s worth of work. I did notice that it’s not working with my Gmail accounts, but I haven’t had a chance to troubleshoot that yet.

Next up: the browser. Firefox was already installed, but, like Thunderbird, I had customized it to a considerable degree on the Windows computer. So I copied the profile for that over, too. Upon launching Firefox, I found that I had all my settings, including the add-ons I had installed. The toolbars were properly arranged, and it even restored the session from the Windows computer.

My next-most-used application is probably Putty. I manage most of my servers from the command line, and Putty does the trick. This isn’t a problem in Ubuntu. I can just open up a terminal window and secure shell to the servers. No special software is needed. I added a terminal icon to the Gnome panel to make this faster, and was all set.

Now, it’s time for some more challenging tasks. I have a Palm LifeDrive. On a good day, if the stars are aligned and the gods are smiling, I can eventually make a Palm talk to a Windows computer without my kids learning too many new words. I’ll be amazed if I can get it to work with Linux any easier. After that, it’s time to start playing with audio. Stay tuned…

Dave’s been trying to get me to try Ubuntu out as a desktop OS. I’ve tried to run Linux on the desktop several times. It just always seems like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I can’t find the drivers I need. Or I can’t run the applications I use. Or it’s just too much of a pain to use. I’ve tried a bunch of different distributions, and the result has always been the same. Dave says it took him eight tries before he was ready to switch. This is going to be my sixth.

I’m going to give it an honest effort. I will take a standard desktop computer and install Linux on it. I’m going to use the current version of Ubuntu, which is designed to be a desktop operating system. I will try to configure it as my primary computer at work. I’m not going to place unreasonable demands on it. I don’t expect the management software for my NEC phone switches to work in Linux. I don’t even expect to be able to play SimCity on it. But I do expect it to do all of the things I normally use my computer for, including web browsing, email, productivity applications (word processing and spreadsheet), podcast aggregation, Internet telephony, and calendar and PDA syncing. It needs to play any kind of audio and video media I encounter. I need access to network drives, printers, digital cameras, and MP3 players.

I’m starting with a Dell Optiplex 740. This machine is about a year old. It has an AMD Athalon processor, 1 GB of RAM, and an 80 GB hard disk. Unlike previous attempts, when I expected Linux to perform better than Windows given the same hardware, I’m using essentially the same hardware that we would put in a classroom today. I’ll be comparing it to a comparably equipped desktop running Windows XP. I’m not going to do crazy amounts of performance testing. On that front, everything will be subjective.

I’ll keep posting some running notes about the journey here on my blog. They may not be quite as polished as my normal posts, so they may not be on the front page of the blog. Just check out the “desktop linux” category any time to keep track of my progress.

So… I booted from the CD and double clicked the Install icon.  So far, so good.