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Firefox addon toolbar buttons not displayedI've been using my Toshiba Satellite as my main workhorse, and my Acer Netbook as a system for running presentations at conferences and user group meetings and for clients. I took only the Acer with me on a business trip recently, and I became quite frustrated with using Windows XP all the time, rather than just for running presentations. Besides that, I missed having the usual tools available. I decided to load Ubuntu Linux on the Acer so I would have similar environments on both machines, and to avoid the hassle of using Windows.
I have a conventional dual-boot setup on the Toshiba. For the Acer, I decided to try Wubi, a program for Microsoft Windows that manages an Ubuntu dual boot for you, without your having to repartition the hard drive manually. I wanted to see how the user experience compares with the conventional dual boot setup.
Wubi install
First, I went to
http://wubi-installer.org/ and downloaded the Wubi installer.
Next, I started Windows XP on the Acer and ran the installer, following the prompts as needed. Everything went smoothly.
After rebooting into Ubuntu Linux, Wubi copied the basic installation files and set up its pseudo partition. It installed 9.10 Karmic.
Making Ubuntu the default OS on boot
By default, Wubi has Windows as the default OS. To change that, here is what I did:
1. Boot into Windows XP.
2. Go to Control Panel
3. Switch to Classic View
4. Choose: System -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery
5. From "Default Operating System" drop-down list, choose "Ubuntu"
6. Click OK on all open dialog windows to close them
Ubuntu upgrade
From there, I followed my own instructions for updating the system and loading the various programs I use, starting with this blog post:
http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/updating-ubuntu.html. The system upgrade went smoothly.
Ruby development support
The next step was to install support for ruby development. I followed the steps I had documented previously in this post:
http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-ruby.html.
Things had changed a bit since I installed 9.04. Here are the differences I encountered:
1. When I ran the command
sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev
the virtual package name libmysqlclient-dev was resolved automatically and the correct components were installed without the need for any additional action on my part.
2. When I installed the ruby bindings for MySQL, the software installed correctly but the ri documentation was missing a lot of bits and pieces. I did not consider this a serious problem.
3. The menu option Applications -> Add/Remove Applications was replaced by Ubuntu Software Center. I discovered that when I started to type the name of an application into the search box, it auto-filled all matching names. This was faster than the old way of finding the packages I wanted.
No problems with the rest of the ruby-related stuff, except some of the ri docs for nokogiri were missing. For the scripts and aliases documented in the original blog post, I just copied the files from the Toshiba laptop.
Java development support
I followed the instructions I had documented earlier in this post:
http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-java.html. Everything worked the same as the first time, with the following exceptions:
1. Eclipse Galileo was installed by default. No additional steps were needed on my part.
2. Previously, Eclipse installed with a default value for the classpath variable M2_REPO. This time, it had no default definition. In Eclipse, under Window -> Preferences -> Java -> Build Path -> Classpath Variables, I added M2_REPO to point to /home/dave/.m2.
3. This time, migrating my existing projects to the new instance of Ubuntu was easier, since I was copying them from another Ubuntu instance that was configured in the same way. The first time around, I copied project files from an OS X system that was configured a bit differently.
Tomcat install
I had some difficulty with the standard installation procedure the first time around, as described in this post:
http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-tomcat.html. This time, I checked for updated documentation and found this information about installing Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu 9.10:
https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/serverguide/C/tomcat.html. Per that documentation, I ran the command
sudo apt-get install tomcat6
and the It Works! page came up fine.
ColdFusion install
I skipped the ColdFusion installation for the moment, since I wouldn't need it in the near future.
.NET support
As before (see
http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-support-for-net.html), I entered the command
sudo apt-get install mono-devel
To install the IDE, used Ubuntu Software Center, and then found it under Applications -> Programming. Go figure. I didn't try the Hello, World! programs this time, because I'm confident in the package.
The NUnit and debugger installs went smoothly.
Git install
The git install went smoothly, as documented here:
http://kotowanandesu.blogspot.com/2009/08/installing-git.html.
eXPlainPMT install
I skipped this install, since I've started using the Kanban approach rather than the iterative approach on personal development projects.
Firefox development add-ons
I skipped this, since I won't be using the Acer as my primary development platform.
...and the rest of it
All that remained was to copy files from the Toshiba to the Acer. Up and running!
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