Recently I have been using the newest Macbook Pro 15″, and I thought I would update my direct experience on how Ubuntu and OS X stack up.

Web Browsing
On both platforms Chrome, in my view, is the defacto standard for nerds and an ever increasing porportion of the general population. Having used Safari for the first month to try ‘the apple way’, I can say that Chrome feels faster, has better features, and was just really well thought out. Both platforms are a wash on this one.

Flash Plugin
This one is also a wash, both platforms have support for flash — I actually think Ubuntu has an edge here since Flash can be installed via the package manager, instead of an entirely separate installer in OS X.

Text Editing
Textmate is a very cool application, with tons of pre-defined bundles that allow for quick completion, and a great project view.  However for Java development, it seems that IDE autocompletion / debugger integration is hard to beat (Eclipse / Netbeans work on both platforms), while for Python / Ruby etc Vim was a better fit for both platforms, as an advanced user.  Definitely a great entry level editor that is an inbetween for Gedit / Vim.

Terminals
I think here gnome-terminal blows away terminal.app — gnome-terminal is noticeably faster and the design was clearly by people using the terminal day in and out.  I think the Mac community feels the same way, and in general uses ITerm, or the recently released ITerm2 (not same authors as ITerm oddly enough).  ITerm2 does work well, but again it feels like the terminal lacks speed in comparison.

Performance
One thing that struck me was the lack of responsiveness / speed.  This Macbook is a quad core with an ATI dedicated graphics card, but for most operations the OS feels quite sluggish.  Starting up iTunes or Safari takes much longer than you would expect for a $2000 USD piece of machinery.  I will however note that I only use Gnome 2, so Gnome 3 may suffer from a similar issue, but I am not experienced enough to write about it.

Application Installation Method
I was able to install apps through the Mac App Store, in the same manner I do in Ubuntu using the Software Center.  The Mac App store has many more commercial applications, however most of them like Photoshop are just not needed for a Linux veteran as Gimp does everything needed.  I also purchased XCode 4, but was underwhelmed other than the Iphone emulator which ran awesome in comparison to the Android emulator I was previously used to.

Email
I am sure a lot of people use Mail.app and like it, but I have always been a fan of the GMail interface.  I guess if we are comparing Apples to Apples, Evolution and Mail.app are both not very strong competitors (ie the rest of the world either runs on Outlook or Gmail).

Photo Management
iPhoto is a strong point, it is very easy, intuitive and nice looking to manage photos.   Linux alternatives here are weak.

Music Management
iTunes is a horrible, slow monster of expensive music.  One thing I miss is my Droid and the Amazon MP3 application, as that was by far a better deal, and my purchases went straight to the cloud.  iCloud is coming shortly, but Amazon is still my vendor of choice, and they already have proven to get the cloud right.

Gaming
OS X and Ubuntu both have my favorite game, Heroes of Newerth.  Mac OS X has Steam, which is definitely a benefit and World of Warcraft.  Ubuntu can’t really compete in this arena, so it is something to consider.

Conclusion
So, if you were like me, and curious about Mac OS X, you can see I am not overall impressed.  Maybe I am just biased towards Ubuntu, but I find overall it has favorable performance, and I can change out any pieces I don’t like.   I would recommend OS X if you wanted a generally worse experience but the ability to install Photoshop and a few more games (still nothing compared to Windows in this respect).

Related posts:

1. Workspaces
2. The Cherokee Webserver
3. Flash 64-bit on Ubuntu Intrepid

It’s All About the Mentality
I respect and admire programmers like @migueldeicaza, @mitsuhiko, mandrake, @dhh for all they have accomplished. One thing they all have in common, present day, is running OS X. Mandrake cowrote Enlightenment (which is the original really cool window manager for Linux), Miguel started Gnome, and the majority of code both Mitsuhiko (wrote almost every useful Python library ever) and DHH (Ruby on Rails) write run on Linux backends to say the least.

What are they most known for? Problem solving skills mixed with actually producing / releasing.

Linux is Open Source
And this, I believe, is why great developers tend to move towards OS X (yes, there are plenty of exceptions). A critical piece of writing software is focus. When a problem solver uses a Linux desktop, they are immediately confronted with the possibility of being able to modify every part of their system. When a problem solver runs OS X, their options are severely limited, by design.

I think all of us are guilty for hunting down PPAs to get a backported browser, or running ‘./configure && make && make install’ at some point. And when you have programming skills, source code can turn into a detriment to productivity when you start modifying projects outside of what you intended to accomplish. All of a sudden you start hacking a project for a few minutes, and wake up days later in a coding haze with all of that time lost.

Personally I have had experience with this while using old Linux distributions. We have SLES 9 systems and SLES 10 systems here at work, and in the past year I have spent countless hours hacking Sprint 3G wireless drivers, USB over IP, Firefox 3 and countless others to work on these older systems. Why? Not because they are the primary goal, but because I could, which in turn took up time from things I actually “wanted” to do.

Time is Valuable
Watching one of Miguel’s presentations, he mentions that he does not have enough years left to “worry about memory management” and that they leave that to the younger folks. This is the crux of the argument. For programmers, there is far too much opportunity for distraction at every avenue. We don’t know how long we will be here for, but certainly we know that nothing we care about will get done as long as our focus is spread so thin across the spectrum of Linux.

Summary
This is all just food for thought, not a judgement against any form of desktop or usage pattern. For reference, I am still running Ubuntu on my desktop, and being wildly unproductive on the tasks I want to finish.

Related posts:

1. Open Source RadeonHD driver 1.2.2 released
2. Creative open sources their driver
3. Howto: Add updated e1000 driver to SLED 10 SP1

Position involves Linux development, and you should know php / perl. The project will involve modems and java also, and the ability to document everything would be great.

Good news about the position is I am leading the project, so anything you can’t figure out, I will. Pay will be somewhere in the $100/hr range, and we need you to be in Cincinnati for the two weeks (3/8 – 3/19), 40 hours per week.

Send me an email (you can find my info in launchpad) or post a comment here if you think you fit the bill. Anyone who has any Ubuntu development experience or contributions to visible projects will definitely take priority. Remember, you need to have the ability to be in Cincinnati, as travel is not covered.

Related posts:

1. Got skills? Email me
2. Linux guru needed
3. Linus vs. Gnome

The long term solution would be to see 100% adoption of OpenID. Inevitably many sites will always be behind the curve, so until that day comes, I recommend Revelation.

Revelation is an easy to use, secure and lightweight password manager for Linux. It is written in GTK so those running the GNOME desktop (the default for Ubuntu) will be right at home. You can have several different folders to help organize your passwords, and define actions based on the type of password being stored.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a screenshot of Revelation in action:

What makes this great is that all of your passwords are stored encrypted. This means if someone takes your computer, without your master password your passwords would be useless. This also means we can store our password using Ubuntu One or Dropbox.

If you are curious about Dropbox I wrote a post with screenshots showing exactly how it works. Simply save your Revelation password file there, and all of your systems that have Dropbox will now have access to those passwords (once you unlock it for that session of course).

Under the preferences window in Revelation you can also adjust your default password size (when you use Revelation you simply randomly generate a new password for each website) for as long as you need, with the longer the better.

If you are running Ubuntu, you can install Revelation by clicking Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center and searching for Revelation. If you would prefer the command line version:

# sudo apt-get install revelation

There are many alternatives out there, but if you are running Linux and just need a simple, no-hassle password manager Revelation is worth five minutes to try it out.

Related posts:

1. Using KeepassX on Ubuntu Linux
2. Dropbox on Ubuntu
3. Automatically Backup Blogs / Websites to Amazon S3

However, in my haste to order that one, I ordered 2 of these:

So if you are looking to get started with X11 / Xlib / Xorg these are handy to have around. Since I have 2 copies of the pink reference manual, if you want one, email me at sharms at ubuntu period com and I will send you my extra copy for free. Or if you want I can bring it to Ohio Linux Fest 2009 and give it to you there.

Update: Book claimed already

Related posts:

1. Getting started with Xorg development
2. Bug report
3. Got skills? Email me

I will start:

Following up from my previous post, the most fun thing I did was compete in the Engine Yard Contest.. I created a python client, which communicated the results back to my webserver every 23 minutes via xml. On the webserver itself, I used the watch command to provide stats that auto update: ‘watch -n 30 “cat /tmp/results | sort | uniq | head”‘. The results had their score first, with lowest being the best like golf.

My favorite webpage I have viewed today has been the Arch Linux July Screenshots thread: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=75154

Related posts:

1. Bash frequently used commands
2. Python Commands Module

Monodevelop
Monodevelop is the tool we are using as our editor. This is Linux’s equivalent of Visual Studio. It can be used to code, debug and design your application, and can link in with revision control systems. This article was written using version 2.0, if your version is not 2.0 you may see slight differences.

Create your project
After starting Monodevelop, go to File -> New -> Solution. You will be presented with a prompt asking which kind of solution we are starting. Click on C# -> Gtk# 2.0 Project as shown below:

Go ahead and click “Forward”. This will drop us at the default Monodevelop screen, and bring up a boilerplate to work from. For this guide we will mainly be working in the Designer mode. In the above picture we named our project helloWorldGraphical. I suggest you name yours the same unless you are already familiar with C#. Navigate to Solution helloWorldGraphical -> helloWorldGraphical -> User Interface -> MainWindow. Here you will see the designer window. If it shows source code, click the Designer tab as shown:

So now we have a window. By default, there does not appear to be any buttons to do anything fun with it. We need to change that by going to View -> Toolbox. This will allow us to place buttons, boxes, whatever we want.

Now that we have a bunch of different buttons, what we need is a VBox. This is a vertical box that will help us position our elements. Gtk graphical interfaces use containers to figure out what goes where. For now lets just drag a VBox and leave it with the defaults (just click and drag it on to your window):

Now that we have a container, we can drag a Label. A label just allows us to display some arbitrary text, nothing too special. Go ahead and drag it inside the VBox we just dragged:

Now that we have a label we can set it’s text to HelloWorld and get a glympse of how to customize GUI elements. To do this we need to open the properties window. To open the properties window go to View -> Properties as shown below:

Properties is where the magic really happens in the designer. You can click on your VBox or Label and set a bunch of different values that will change the way your program behaves. For the purpose of this article, we just want to change the label text:

Where it says ‘label2′ (yours may say different label #), go ahead and change the text to “Hello World”. Your final dialog should look like this:

Now we are ready to test the program. Navigate on the top toolbar to the gears icon, which should say ‘Debug’:

After clicking the icon, your program will launch and you will see a window as below:

And now you have your Hello World program. It doesn’t do anything, but I am sure in future tutorials we will address that. For now just play with the designer properties and keep clicking Debug to see your changes. Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Annoying people with code: A gentle introduction to C# and Mono
2. Annoying people with code: A gentle introduction to C# and Mono Part 2 – Data Types
3. Windows to Linux USB key

Being that I am writing posts this week about programming, and about my Fedora run down, thought people might find this interesting.

I wrote a little test code that fails on Ubuntu but works on Fedora 11 (based off lwn post):

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    // Try to write to memory location 0
    void *mem;
    mem = mmap(NULL, 0x1000, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE, MAP_FIXED | MAP_ANONYMOUS | MAP_PRIVATE, 0, 0);

    if(mem != NULL)
    {
        printf("Could not write to memory position 0\n");
    } else
    {
        printf("We can write to memory location 0\n");
    }

    sprintf((char *) mem, " This is a test\n");
    printf("Memory contents: %s\n", (char *)(mem + (sizeof(char))));
    return 0;
}

Fedora 11 results:

./a.out
We can write to memory location 0
Memory contents: This is a test

Ubuntu 9.04 results:

./a.out
Could not write to memory position 0
Segmentation fault

What does this mean?
As far as I can understand it, userspace programs segfault when trying to access data in the NULL (or 0) memory region. The kernel does not have this limitation. The author of the exploit said this is because GCC optimises out the null check. So if there is kernel code which references a pointer to 0, then you can have it run whatever you want. And in atleast 2.6.30, there is kernel code that does that.

Ubuntu does not let the userspace programs write to 0, but in F11 you can. Interesting stuff.

Related posts:

1. Why?
2. Python and real time graphical analysis
3. Programming using IOCTL to interface with Linux kernel drivers

Variables
A variable is something that stores a value. In different programming languages, these are handled differently. C# is called a static / strongly typed language as you have to tell it what variables are. To explain, I will use python in comparison:

Python Example

x = "This is a string"
y = 5

As you can see, we didn’t have to tell Python anything about what type of variables they are. In C# / Mono, we would do this like this:

C# Example

string x = "This is a string";
int y = 5;

I will tell you, after my years of development, that I program a ton of stuff in PHP / Python today. One of the worst and best parts of these languages is that they are dynamically typed. The fact that C# requires variables to be declared with a type before using makes life easier for testing and reading. There is a stack overflow post on what static typing gives you: Read the stack overflow post.

Variable Naming
Before we continue, you will notice in the top example I used the variable names x and y (to illustrate that the variable names really mean nothing to the compiler / interpreter. If I named them myString you might have been confused). If you do this in real life, I will find you and give you a thorough verbal lashing. I generally use camel case to name variables. Just do not abbreviate them as it really serves no purpose, and makes a lot of pain for people besides yourself maintaining code.

You can read about camel case at wikipedia.

The Source
For this program, I copied our HelloWorld.cs, and just modified it. I also have a modified makefile.

dataTypes.cs

using System;

// We create a class to contain it
class dataTypes
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // The type 'bool' is always true or false
        bool isMonoTheOnlyPatentRisk = false;

        // To check if it is true or false in program code,
        // we can use an 'if statement'
        if(isMonoTheOnlyPatentRisk)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("isMonoTheOnlyPatentRisk was set to true");
        } else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("isMonoTheOnlyPatentRisk was set to false");
        }

        // Note how I named the variables -
        // lowercaseFirstThenCapitalizeEachWorld
        // this is called camel case -- I first read about it
        // in a Charles Petzold book, but I am sure it
        // probably didn't originate there.  Either way its
        // how I code, I recommend you name variables
        // as descriptive as possible.

        // Note to only kids:  You will have the initial
        // reaction of saying: Why should I name stuff long?
        // That takes time and is stupid!
        // I used to be you 10 years ago, the problem is if
        // you need to use your code in several years of not
        // using it.  Your time will be completely wasted
        // figuring out what the heck is going on, despite
        // seeming so intuitive / easy to understand when you
        // did it

        // Integers store numbers
        int ourNumber = 5;

        // In most langauges we can evaluate these in
        // 'if statements' like bools above, but if we try in
        // C# this will fail.  In C# a bool can only be 0 for
        // false, 1 for true, or we can use the
        // Convert.ToBoolean function like this:
        if(Convert.ToBoolean(ourNumber))
        {
            Console.WriteLine("ourNumber was not 0!");
        } else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("ourNumber was 0");
        }

        // Lets see if we can compare this number
        if(ourNumber > 4)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("ourNumber was greater than 4");
        } else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("ourNumber was less than or equal to 4");
        }

        // Make a string, and output it
        string helloWorldVariable = "Hello World!";
        Console.WriteLine(helloWorldVariable);
    }
}

Makefile

COMPILER=gmcs

all: helloWorld.exe dataTypes.exe

helloWorld.exe: helloWorld.cs
	$(COMPILER) helloWorld.cs

dataTypes.exe: dataTypes.cs
	$(COMPILER) dataTypes.cs
clean:
	rm -f helloWorld.exe dataTypes.exe

.PHONY: all clean

Output from our terminal

[sharms@sparrow mono]$ make
gmcs helloWorld.cs
gmcs dataTypes.cs
[sharms@sparrow mono]$ mono dataTypes.exe
isMonoTheOnlyPatentRisk was set to false
ourNumber was not 0!
ourNumber was greater than 4
Hello World!

Bonus Tip
Did you notice in the first part the way I named the bool? If you are programming, generally, your bool’s should start with ‘is’. This becomes very important once you start making complex ‘if statements’. Trust me on this one, it’s a habit you want.

Related posts:

1. Annoying people with code: A gentle introduction to C# and Mono
2. Annoying people with code: A gentle introduction to C# and Mono Part 3: Creating a GUI (Graphical) Mono / C# Program
3. Creating graphs in python

• Fedora 11 SELinux by default: Cool but confusing
• Fedora 11 repositories: Better selection than previous releases, still not as many choices as Ubuntu
• Ubuntu still wins on the default menu organization for new users (just a bit easier to navigate)
• Fedora bootup vs. Ubuntu bootup is about a wash, they both look good and are fast
• Default themes: Neither will win a competition on looks, Linux Mint is much better looking than both
• Yum vs. Apt: Yum was fast, but a lot of 404′s on the repositories (which is more of an issue of Fedora’s mirror infrastructure)
• PPAs vs. ???: This is where Fedora appears (correct me if I am wrong) to have absolutely no answer to OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. In Ubuntu we can get up to date packages that were not yet officially released using PPAs. OpenSUSE users can download packages from the build service. Fedora really has nothing this fun (I am aware OpenSUSE can build Fedora packages, but the selection is not even close).
• Support: Fedora is a distro that is on the cutting edge. It will never compete in support, but this is intentional.
• Community: Ubuntu community is simply the biggest Linux community on the internet. Nobody is even in the same ball park. This also means that Ubuntu has much more “noise” than Fedora (ie people who contribute nothing and are generally factually inaccurate). Experts may like Fedora more because of the lack of this noise.

So if you are looking to try out Fedora, I don’t think you will gain or miss much. Personally I am going to put Ubuntu back on as I really love software from PPAs, and I love using apt just out of habit. But hope that helps someone who wonders what the differences are or what they are missing.

I have added a screenshot which is the default screen with Gnome-Do with docky theme, but this obviously works in Ubuntu also:

Related posts:

1. Haproxy packages
2. Fedora Core 6
3. Novell Linux Client on Ubuntu redux