Goodbye Windows, and welcome back Ubuntu my long lost friend. Finally after a year of working with Windows I managed to find some time to get rid of it and install Ubuntu on my work laptop instead. I can’t tell you how much I missed not having apt-get! I am absolutely thrilled to be using Ubuntu again, and with Compiz now a part of Gutsy Gibbon I no longer have OS X envy anymore. Really I don’t, I haven’t touched my eMac in days, mostly due to wasting so much time tweaking Gnome with eye candy that my eyes hurt.
Furthermore, I made the switch because developing Ruby on Rails applications on Windows is such a pain, and most developers know this, so they go out and buy Macs. Well my friends, you can save your dosh and turn your stock standard Dell into a kick arse development environment for Rails. Just check out the screenshot of my desktop below.
I am using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with Compiz and Emerald. I also have AWN installed for the dock functionality. For Ruby on Rails development I am using a tweaked version of Gedit with plugins that provide much of the functionality of Textmate and more. You can also get Gedit to recognise rhtml files, and provide a real terminal for handy access to command line functionality in the bottom pane.
Sadly I have to keep my Windows partition around for Lotus Notes, but for not much longer. The next release of Lotus Notes will provide support for Ubuntu, and is due out around the middle of this year. Only a few more months until I can completely blow away my Windows partition!
Developing Rails and other Linux loving technologies in Windows is a pain, I did the switch more than a year ago and I don’t miss anything. I would recommend trying to run Windows virtualized using Virtual Box, maybe it works for your Notes Development.
Off Topic: Please feel free to register at RubyCorner.com a directory for blogs related to the Ruby Programming Language and the related technologies, like Rails.
You can use wine to run Lotus Notes in ubuntu. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than booting into windows.
You may want to take a serious look at Geany for your Rails IDE. I switched from using Gedit to the new 0.13 version of Geany within the past few days and am loving it so far.
http://geany.uvena.de/Main/HomePage
Benefits it has over Gedit include “Find In Files” function to search globally for keywords, (this was big for me), a SVN / Git integration plugin, and code folding. It also has snippets and syntax highlighting just like the updated Gedit. The best part is that there is very little configuration needed to get up and running. (You do have to install from source, though. The version in the apt-get repo is 0.12 which does not have a file browser.)
Also, +1 for VirtualBox. You are able to access a Windows partition from your main Ubuntu partition with VirtualBox. And, as an added bonus, VirtualBox has seamless windows meaning that you can have windows programs (such as Notes) directly on your Ubuntu desktop. Performance has not been an issue for me, either. Here is a how-to on how to get your Windows partition set-up.
http://mesbalivernes.blogspot.com/2008/01/virtual-box-booting-from-existing.html
Hi, probably a little late, but Lotus Notes just runs great under wine, with some extra dll? that is
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Good stuff!
Off topic: ” I can’t tell you how much I missed not having apt-get!”
I quess you mean ” I can’t tell you how much I missed having apt-get!” Without the NOT?
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Nice to know this blog