Ubuntu Productivity

AnandTech ran an interesting (and VERY thorough) review of Ubuntu 8.04. I wanted to highlight my favorite section.

Titled CPU Benchmarks, they test applications running on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu. The amazing thing is the applications running on Ubuntu via Wine performed better than they did on Windows!

Let’s let that sink in for a moment…the open-source project written ½ by volunteers and ½ by commercial interests, intended to duplicate the Windows API on Linux, actually outperforms the software it’s intended to mimic. That’s amazing to me.

Check out these two images from the article that prove Wine can be faster than Windows:

Excel running on Windows & Ubuntu via Wine

Photoshop CS2 running on Ubuntu Linux (via Wine) and Windows XP

The strangest graph of them all is the last one on that page: it shows mp3 encoding on Ubuntu, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu via Wine. The Wine version ran faster that either the native Windows or native Ubuntu test.

I’m really looking forward to this project maturing: Nautilus support for Google Docs.

During his 12 weeks at Google’s Summer of Code this developer managed to integrate Google Doc’s cloud with Nautilus, so all your docs can be browsed and edited on Linux just like normal documents. This is how I imagined cloud computing working, where the document can be accessed both locally and remotely, and all the cloud docs can be easily backed up like any other file on your system.

I’m particularly interested in the fact that all the docs appear as OpenOffice files.

I am excited to see that gPHPEdit is now under active development again. I downoaded the Feb 9, 2009 snapshot and tried compiling it.

At first I was given the error that the following libraries were not installed:

gtk+-2.0
libgnomeui-2.0
gnome-vfs-2.0
libgtkhtml-2.0

So I ran these commands to install them:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libgnomeui-dev

Then navigate to the source directory and run these commands in your terminal:

cd gphpedit
./configure
make
sudo make install

Here is gPHPEdit 0.9.91 running on Ubuntu 9.04

gPHPEdit 0.9.91 running on Ubuntu 9.04

Recently I re-configured my setup for more convenient dual-booting between Mac OS & Ubuntu Linux. I created a common hfs+ partition that both Ubuntu and Mac OS share, and this is my main storage for my work.

It took a bit of finagling to get Ubuntu Linux writing to the hfs+ drive, so I wanted to share my experience for those who might benefit from it.

Furthermore, I experienced a wierd issue where, while running Ubuntu my computer improperly shut down, and the hfs+ drive was no longer writeable. Below is how I fixed that.

Setup

Mac OS Leopard on hfs+ journaled partition

Ubuntu 9.04 on ext4 partition

Common hfs+ (unjournaled) partition for sharing data

Prepare Ubuntu

I found everything I needed to mount an hfs+ drive already installed on Ubuntu. But write support was not working be default. So I edited my /etc/fstab to include this as the last item, and it mounts the drive with read/write permissions.

/dev/sda3 /mnt/common hfsplus user,auto,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

From what I found about fstab, here’s what all that means:

1. “/dev/sda3″ is the path to the drive’s partition
2. “/mnt/common” is the location I want to mount the drive at
3. “hfsplus” is the partition type
4. “user” allows a normal user (not just root) to mount this drive
5. “auto” means mount automatically when booting
6. “uid” is my user’s id, allowing it access to this mount point
7. “gid” is my user’s group id, allowing that group access to this mount point
8. The two zeros at the end…
   1. zero 1 is the dump option: “should this be backed up?” Zero means “no”
   2. zero 2 is the order in which fsck should check the filesystems. Zero means “don’t check”

One caveat, I had to adjust the permissions on all files that I want read & write access to in both operating systems. Otherwise, when Ubuntu saved a file, OS X only had read permission, and vise-versa.

Here’s the command that recursively sets permissions an all files in the common drive to 777:

sudo chmod -R 777 /mnt/common

Fix hfs+ read/write when improperly shut down

Once, after hibernating my computer in Ubuntu, it would not wake up, so I force-restarted. Evidently this caused the common partition to have an improperly-unmounted flag that would not let Ubuntu write to it. After booting into OS X and restarting into Ubuntu, it worked. I guess booting into Mac OS reset that flag…but I’m not entirely sure. But it did fix my read/write access to my hfs+ partition