Disinformation Disinfected, Pt. 1

One of the things that bothers me about Novell is there are a few very vocal people pumping out a lot of disinformation. Some of it I have touched on in passing, but I might just try my hand at pointing out one point at a time in a series of posts. Fear my blogging!

Most of the disinformation is in the areas of mono and Moonlight (no surprise there), but I’ll start with what I consider a clear cut case of hypocrisy from another controversial Novell project…

Ubuntu at work

Sometimes I actually do something

Today I really put Ubuntu to the test for work. I needed to get some things done on a web site, and I felt comfortable enough to try to handle everything from Ubuntu. I didn’t (physically) touch my WinXP laptop, and I got everything done!

I probably wont ever go into this much detail about my daily work (it’s not that interesting). However, I wanted to show that (with a very minor exception), I got everything done I needed to do strictly in Ubuntu. This is the exact same thing I would have been doing on WinXP less than a month ago!

My super-exciting day at work

First, I needed to work on some image files (roughly 20,000). Now, these were already on my WinXP laptop, and I have two ways now to get at my laptop from Ubuntu, rarely do I have to physically touch Windows. For one thing, I have a shared drive set up, which is mounted in Ubuntu. I also have Terminal Server Client, so I can “Remote Desktop” into the laptop and then do whatever I need to do (including placing things on the shared drive). Very nice.

After copying over the files, I needed to rename them according to an “old part number/new part number” cross-reference. The cross-reference came as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet over email, which I simply opened with Open Office Calc, cleaned up and saved as a CSV text file.

I wrote a little Ruby script to handle the renaming – as I mentioned I am learning Ruby and this was a good opportunity to try doing something useful. This took a long time, because obviously I don’t know the language yet, so I made lots of small errors like trying:

filename = gets
File.open(filename, 'r')

instead of:

filename = gets.chomp
File.open(filename, 'r')


That actually took me quite a while to figure out, because I couldn’t find anything about it searching.

Files renamed, I uploaded them to the server with Filezilla.

Since this took a while (20,000+ images, remember?), I set up LAMP, which was easy to do by following this blog post. See, I needed to update the MySQL database to match up the parts with the images. To work out the queries and test, I downloaded the appropriate tables and did the necessary bits in phpMyAdmin.

Finally, I wanted to twiddle with the tables a little more, so I created my first Open Office Base database and double-checked the work I did in phpMyAdmin.

My impressions

Obviously, everything got done, and the only thing that took me a long time was writing the Ruby script. Still, I’m not sure how quickly I could have gotten that done in Windows, as renaming things according to a cross-reference list would require either some scripting or finding a little application that could do it for me.

I did run into a bug in Nautilus, where trying to open the directory with all those images took a loooong time, and I think even crashed Nautilus – at one point it was using like 2.8GB of memory. I eventually gave up on trying to browse the directory, and just used the command line.

Quirk: Open Office Writer Icons

Open Office Writer didn’t have any icons on any menus when I first started using it.

Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > View > Icon size and style

And setting the style to “Human” got me some icons.  Although there are about a half-dozen options, “Human” is the only one that showed and icons.