New Laptop

It's back-to-school time, I've bought a new laptop - a Sony Vaio F-series with a full 1920x1080 resolution.  I read a lot of research papers, which are typically PDF documents formatted into multiple columns.  It was painful on the old laptop - I'd have to scroll up and down each page.   So I would put the screen into 'portrait' mode to view the documents as full pages, but I didn't have quite the resolution to make it comfortable.  With this new machine, reading papers is a joy.

But there's a downside - I'm back to running Windows.   I spent almost a week trying to put my beloved Linux environment on this machine, but gave up defeated.  The problem is the video card - I can't get the NVIDIA drivers available in Linux to work on this machine.  I know that Sony uses NVIDIA hardware under the hood, there's a small sticker advertising 'NVIDIA GEFORCE WITH CUDA on the keyboard.  But I'm not a X-Org guru, and xserver internals defeated me.

It started auspiciously - I repartitioned the disk, loaded an old Ubuntu 'Hardy Heron' CD, and got a basic system up in a very short time (under low resolution, but I didn't know about the problem then).  Then I let the machine upgrade itself version-by-version to the current 'Lucid Lynx', which was time consuming but effortless.

Then I tried to configure the screen - and lost the ability to see what I was doing.  If you mess up the screen, you can't even find an 'undo' button - it's time to power down and roll back, try again.   I must have rebooted about 30 times before I finally gave up.  Finally fell back to the system recovery disk (which took a full day), and put Windows back in.



Not totally Windows, I put in the Ubuntu 'Windows Installer' version - a really neat program that drops Ubuntu as a file under Windows.  It uses the Windows boot-selection instead of GRUB (so the default is to open Windows).  But I'm running Linux without NVIDIA so the resolution is low, Windows is going to be my default environment for a while.  

I've pointed the Apache servers under both Windows and Ubuntu to the same directory so I can test my code under both.  I am going to try to re-install MySQL to share the same database files, not sure if that's possible.



Windows 7 is a huge improvement over its horrible predecessor.  It has copied some nice Linux features like pinning programs to the toolbar.  But it is slow and clunky by comparison with Ubuntu - especially with the mandatory anti-virus programs endlessly chugging away in the background.  I've got an i7 processor that shows 8 CPU's in the task manager, 6GB of Ram, and a 7,500 RPM drive, but it FEELS slower than my old laptop under Linux.

Good news is that a lot of my favorite tools run under Windows.  Firefox, of course, and PHP, Apache, MySQL.  But also Komodo Edit and Inkscape, which are amazing - check them out.  GEdit was my all-purpose quick-and-dirty editor under Linux, Notepad keeps breaking things.  Happily, GNOME provides a Windows build of GEdit.

In fairness, it's nice to know where everything is again.  I spent 20 years developing under Windows, and know it much better than I know Linux.  Nothing important has really changed since NT 4.0, the DOS commands still work.   It's nice that I will be able to use Adobe's FLASH tools, and OFFICE is clearly better than OpenOffice, but the different isn't enough that I would pick Windows if I had the choice. 

The one happy surprise is a program called PDF-XChange Viewer, which replaces Okular as my PDF viewer and annotator.  The free 'base version' is BETTER than Okular (in fairness, Okular was just a student project for a Google Summer-of-Code).




I give the Sony VAIO high marks.  It's lightweight and clean-looking.  It cost much less than I expected - about half of the comparable DELL machine.  I LOVE the big screen - it's amazingly bright and crisp.  Two complaints - the mouse touchpad is not deep enough, so I keep touching it accidentally (I had to turn off the tap features).   And although they have provided every kind of interface imaginable - SATA, HDMI, SD card, ExpressCard, FireWire, optical headphone jack, and their proprietary MagicGate, for some reason there are only two USB ports. 

The typing keyboard isn't centered in front of the screen, since Sony provides a full keyboard with numeric pad.  Seems a bit weird at first.  But with the huge resolution, I rarely run a program in full-screen. 



A number of people have written to me asking for a copy of Web-Agenda when it is ready.  When I ported Web-Agenda onto this machine, I realized that the major installation task facing them will be getting Joomla! running and configured.  There are simple tools for installing PHP, MySQL, and Apache, including WampServer2 that will install all three at one time.  But Joomla! has a sharp learning curve.

So I have walked through the source and ripped out Joomla!, replacing most features with local code.  Still doing some cleanup where I didn't provide my own CSS (so that I inherited the look-and-feel of whatever template was loaded).

I hope I can provide some screenshots with the next blog posting.