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.
Ik hoorde dat Skype bezig is met een open source versie van de client. Dat wordt dus ooit als het goed is ook een simpele installatie via de standaard repositories.
Maar inderdaad, Ubuntu is een prima platform voor ontwikkelaars. Als persoonlijke desktop heb ik toch het liefst een Mac.
Man, man, man, dit was de smoes geweest om zelf een Powerbook te kopen. Gemiste kans!
Gave a presentation on your first working week? Impressive
Well… even better; I gave a demo of the application and the new features which where implemented in last weeks sprint.