Reviving a very old project

[liv]

So nearly 5 years ago, I hatched a plan to get involved in Open Source stuff. And it completely foundered because I tried to install Ubuntu on a netbook and didn't really even get started. Today, I tried again and actually got somewhere.

I'm really embarrassed that I didn't try again for such a long time, but I let myself get blocked on the expectation that it was going to be frustrating. I'm a scientist, I'm generally comfortable with failure and troubleshooting. Indeed, it was my plan to identify and document and report what went wrong in order to make it easier for other people in future. However, I didn't really even get to the stage of failing, just didn't get started at all. And it sort of turned into an obligation, I made the mistake of telling myself I should try again, and I rebelled against my own intention.

And I know the pandemic isn't really the right time for that big project you've been putting off for ages. But it isn't the wrong time either. I have a bit more time and having another go at scaling the cliff face might be less appealing than any number of social things but it's more appealing than just scrolling through Twitter.

There's another motivation, which is that my Windows laptop is slowly dying. It's 7 years old (and wasn't the latest tech when I got it) and ridiculously underpowered for modern anything, and I've already resurrected it once. I might be able to fix the cooling problem again, but the touchpad is failing in awkward ways, and I don't think it has much scope to upgrade the hardware eg add RAM or replace the hard disk. Also it is pretty irresponsible to continue running Win7 on an internet-connected machine, and I find myself deeply reluctant to either 'upgrade' to Win10 or get a new machine infested with Win10. I have far less specific need for Windows these days, so if I'm going to get a new computer I might as well use the opportunity to escape from Microsoft's clutches. But I don't want to spend serious money on a new machine until I'm confident I can actually adapt to a new OS.

So. I determined I was going to have another go at converting a spare laptop (a cheap HP machine I bought last time I thought my main home machine was dying) to Ubuntu. It turns out that waiting five years was in some ways exactly the right answer. The Ubuntu website these days has far more helpful instructions compared to last time I looked, and I just followed the step by step instructions and bingo. So I made a bootable USB stick, which was almost trivially easy. And then I attached it to Purple Eyes, and it took a few tries to get Windows to break out of its usual start cycle and recognize a boot source, but that was the only hitch. I told it to delete everything, including Windows as well as all the files (which are all backed up anyway) rather than trying to create any partitions or dual boot cleverness. It felt surprisingly good to nuke Windows! I even removed the sticker from the chassis.

Result: I have a pure, completely default Ubuntu machine, which has the minor bonus of being shiny and purple. And my Win7 laptop isn't actually dead yet so I can keep them running in parallel. I am hoping to switch over to using Purple Eyes II as my main machine and just get myself into Ubuntu habits, as well as documenting the steps I take to set up an environment I can comfortably use. And I'll see if I still need a new laptop after a few months of working on the old machine with semi-new brain.

If anyone wants to recommend me software, please go ahead. I have literally nothing other than whatever's in the default setup. And I have little knowledge of what I'm missing. I mean, I could try to recreate everything I use in Windows but that slightly defeats the object.

Comments

[theandrewhickey]

A few recommendations:
If you're doing much in the way of science *writing*, you'll probably want at least to try LyX. It's a word processor which uses LaTeX as its back-end, so is eminently suitable for creating scientific papers, but I've also used it for writing books, scripts, and all sorts of other things. Some people find it has a steep learning curve, purely because it's not Word or a Wordalike, but once you get used to it you find it's much more sensible than Word, and doesn't fight you in the myriad little ways Word (or Word clones like LibreOffice) do. It also has the most comprehensive documentation of anything I've ever experienced -- it has separate manuals for typesetting musical scores, braille, Feynman diagrams, linguistics (I managed to help cosmolinguist get some diagrams done for a paper the other day, despite neither of us having used LyX for linguistics before, because the documentation was so clear), and more. I wrote two books in LibreOffice and could feel it fighting me every step of the way. I've written eighteen more since I installed LyX, and using it was a pleasure.


You'll probably want to install Glimpse rather than the default image editor. Glimpse is a fork of that default, which doesn't have the ableist name, and which also has a consistent (and much more user-friendly) interface which isn't broken every five seconds by the devs deciding to change how everything works.

If you use ebooks at all, you'll want to install calibre, a library system for ebooks that is to the ebook what iTunes or similar is to music. If you use DRMd ebooks and are ethically comfortable with stripping DRM, you will also want to install the DRM-stripping calibre plugin at apprenticealf.wordpress.com . Using that plugin will involve some fiddling, depending on which ebook providers you use, and you will probably have to install WiNE, a Windows emulator (which may be in the default Ubuntu install, I use a different distro). WiNE is a useful one anyway if you have any Windows-only software you want to continue to use.

There are several MP3 library programs, all of them suboptimal. I find Rhythmbox the least-suboptimal.

VLC is the best program by far for watching downloaded video, or for watching DVDs if your machine has an optical drive.


Other software I find or have found useful -- I don't know your specific needs:
youtube-dl -- a command-line program for downloading videos from YouTube for offline viewing or editing
Keepass2 -- password manager
Rosegarden -- a MIDI program that lets you write music as a score and will play it. Warning -- doing anything involving MIDI is a royal pain in GNU/Linux. This one has the most user-friendly interface, but is flaky on the back-end.
LMMS -- the opposite of Rosegarden. Heavily featureful sampling/sequencer/MIDI/digital audio workstation program, very robust, utterly unintuitive. Doesn't have Rosegarden's "output this as well-typeset sheet music" feature though.
Audacity -- audio editing program. I use this for recording my podcasts and for mixing music. By far the best program for dealing with recorded sound.
Zim -- a wiki for your desktop. Very useful for making notes to oneself about connected projects.
GPodder -- lightweight podcast app

It's also useful to install and learn the basics of a command-line text editor -- I'd suggest vim, as that's the most commonly used. If anything goes wrong, it's useful to be able to edit configuration files from a terminal. This is no longer something one has to do on a regular basis, but it's a handy skill for the rare occasions something goes wrong.

All of those *should* be available in Ubuntu's repositories, except for the Apprentice Alf plugin. Glimpse *may* not, as that's relatively new -- it can be found at https://glimpse-editor.github.io/ .

[sorcyress]

Thank you for this comment (I'm in the same boat as Liv). Any recommendations for photo organization?

[theandrewhickey]

I'm afraid not. I'm not really a photo/image person, and so have never looked into that. Sorry.

[ridicully]

They are KDE, not gnome, but for elaborate photo organisation I use Digikam and for the more basic stuff Gwenview.

[lovingboth]

I haven't looked at Digikam for ages, partly because KDE, but I can see it is way better than Shotwell and could easily replace Picasa for me.

I wonder if there's a way to scroll from one month's pictures to another, rather than have to click this month, scroll, click that month, scroll...

[lovingboth]

1. See if you can get the old version of Google's Picasa to run. You might not be able to - I can't on this machine - but it is by far the best photo organiser I've seen.

2. Consider..

.. Shotwell - fairly basic, does nothing but.

.. RawTherapee - also a good editor for adjusting rather than 'draw this line in this colour' photos

.. DarkTable - ditto, but not as up to date on camera / lens correction data

.. Corel AfterShot Pro 3 - commercial, often on offer if you sign up for their mailing list. If you download something else from Corel, you're often given an offer to upgrade the free AfterShot to AfterShot Pro.

Currently, for organisation, I run Picasa in a Windows VM.

[siderea]

LyX

OooooooOOOOOOOOOoooooooh! This sounds very interesting.

[azurelunatic]

I was going to mention Glimpse also.