Developer Papercuts

Challenge: Eclipse 4

This month challenge will be to get the first version of my Eclipse 4 book out. I’m working on this now for a while and I think I should put a first version out so that people can learn better about the amazing Eclipse 4 platform capabilities.

I’m very busy this month so I hope this works out.

Retroperspective for last month challenge:

Last month I switch completely to Linux / Ubuntu. First of all: Thanks to all for their support to my questions in Twitter and Google.

Ubuntu 11.10 is amazing. Using Linux feels like coming home to me. As a student I used Unix (Solaris) and SUSE Linux a lot. Later at my first job I worked with HP-UX.

Ubuntu gets everything right (for me). The shortcuts are at the right position. It detects my devices without problems and I truely enjoy Unity (after I tweaked it a bit).

It is so nice to be able to run find . -name “*.xml” -print0 | xargs -0 grep -i “stuff I search” and get immediate results. Also using the Git command line feels so better, compared to using it under Windows.

I also also extremely surpised that Ubuntu supported my iPod directly. I just connected it, started Banshee and could maintain my playlists and put music on the iPod. Also the Amazon MP3 store integration is amazing. Much better for me then iTunes on Windows as I buy my stuff at Amazon.

I would like to thank Marcelo Módolo for his tips on Ubuntu. He told me that I can mount FTP accounts in the file explorer. That is a huge time saver for me.

He also gave me a hint to Shutter an awesome screenshot tool. I was kind of afraid that I would miss SnagIt but shutter is even betten IMHO. I was afraid that I would miss SnagIt, but Shutter works even better for me.

Marcelo also gave me a pointer to How to change tooltip background color in Unity to make the Javadoc view in Eclipse readable.

I also had some issues with Ubuntu

I got really frustrated with the Alt+tab key. But after some initial fighting with Alt+tab I learned that if I hold it over an entry with multiple windows (or press the Arrow-Down key) that I can select between multiple windows of the same application.

I also had a problem with the Touchpad. It seems to get activate quite easily. So I wanted to deactivated it but I still wanted to have the Touchpoint avaiable.
Dariusz Luksza gave me the following working tip via Twitter:

synclient TouchpadOff=1

I later got the tip from Thilo Wetzel and Martin Riedelon G+ that the shortcut Fn + F8 also works.

The other annoying things was that the Shift+CTRL+Up shortcut of Eclipse was caught by the Ubuntu system. This shortcut was not listed in the standard shortcut (how can you make fixed shortcuts?). I found an answer to that on the Ask Ubuntu Website – How to turn off the alt-shift-uparraw key.

Also the fading launcher was annoying at first, but I used ccsm to fix its position. It also took me a while to get used to the menu on the top (like the Mac has it). I’m looking forward to HUD in Ubuntu 12.04.

Summary:

I will not switch back. Ubuntu rocks. And just out of completely in the hope to avoid any: “Try a Mac” comments: I once tried using a Mac for a month and I didn’t like it.

Thanks everyone for there help with using Ubuntu. I can really recommend Ubuntu, it is Linux done right in my opinion.

Challenge: Eclipse 4 This month challenge will be to get the first version of my Eclipse 4 book out. I'm working on this now for a while and I think I should put a first version out so that people can learn better about the amazing Eclipse 4 platform capabilities. I'm very busy this month ...

In July I announced that I will try to switch to Linux. I actually needed two months and a broken laptop to make the transition.

The main reason for needing longer then expected is that I have files which I need all the time. I had them on my laptop and therefore I switched frequently to it. As my laptop died a few weeks ago I had the opportunity to think about a better solution.

I solved this problem by using Git to synchronize my data via a Git account.

The setup took a while time because I wanted to use http / https and EGit does currently not support https authentication and msysGit had a bug for which I need to find a workaround. Also github had a bug which fortunately was fixed fast.

It also took me some time to migrate the build infrastructure for vogella.de to Linux. Partly because I forgot how I did the setup and partly because I was not always as strict as I should have been with lower and upper case spelling. Windows is very forgiving in this sense while Linux is not.

So do I like it? I love it. First of all working on my Ubuntu machine is incredible fast. This might not be a big surprise as the machine is relatively new. But I also think that my crashed laptop had an issue with the harddisk (with finally failed). If I did I/O the whole laptop basically froze which was very, very annoying.

One effect I did not foresee was that I now work “geekier”. On Windows I rarely used the command line. On Linux I alway have a few terminals open and do some stuff their. Using Ubuntu I could also finally compile OpenJDK. I also now started using cygwin on Windows for some tasks.

Of course there are new bugs for me, e.g. Ctrl+alt+down arrow is not working on Linux .

In total I’m now a happy Ubuntu user at home. I believe the July monthly challenges was a success even if it took two months.

In July I announced that I will try to switch to Linux. I actually needed two months and a broken laptop to make the transition. The main reason for needing longer then expected is that I have files which I need all the time. I had them on my laptop and therefore I ...