log4p

Last week was my first week at my new employers office. At eBay / Marktplaats I’ll be working on the upcoming version of Marktplaats and various applications/services part of the platform around it.

You can either bring your own hardware or use a corporate laptop. Since I don’t actually own a laptop I went for the corporate machine. I got a (huge) Dell Latitude D830. It contains a T7700 core duo 2.4gz, 4gb of memory and a NVidia Quadro NVS140M (business version of the NVIDIA GeForce 8400M G).

I installed the 64- bit version Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic) from a bootable USB stick during my first day. Installation went smooth. Getting X to recognize all display configurations took some work and is still far from perfect: stuff like detaching a display/docking system and attaching another display doesn’t really work without manual intervention. I setup VMWare and a WinXP image to be able to access all corporate tools and test in IE.

What I like:

• Compiz has some nice tricks for windows selection. alt-shift-up for window selection and some exposé-like features which I mapped to F9 and F10 like I was used to on Osx.
• Gnome Do is a workable replacement for Quicksilver
• Suspending/Hibernating actually works well and configuration is far more flexible then it is on OSX
• apt is so much better than macports/fink
• I like gnome virtual desktops better dan spaces on OSX

What I (still) don’t like (compared to OSX):

• Copying text between applications is still not consistent (at least for me)
• Input dialogs don’t get focus all the time
• Reconfiguration of X is flaky
• Still looking for a workable replacement for Omnigraffle, using Dia for the moment
• I miss Mail.app/Addressbook/iCal
• Some stuff is harder to setup then it should; skype for instance
• Various hardware related aspects: multitouch trackpad being the most important one

But overall the experience is good. I got productive within a day; gave a presentation and used the corporate tools through VMWare. I’ll try and see if I can improve switching X configs, which would really improve the overall experience.