First of all, there is no Bob. Bob is a lie! And the story isn’t epic at all.
It’s a story about what I’ve done over the last week. Yes, it is boring and potentially hazardous to your health so please, don’t read on.
Finally, after thinking about it for a week at least, I bought the Programming Clojure book from the pragmatic programmers. That’ll help me develop Tweetility while doing the right thing and not just something that does work but could be a lot better. I played around a bit with different approaches to managing the Tweets, did some benchmarking here and there to see what’s a good idea and what isn’t. I’m on page 200 of the book right now but I think I’ll have to re-read two chapters because some stuff is really hard to wrap your head around when you are so much used to do object oriented development. The book is pretty good. There are your usual garbage code example with a big warning never to use them in your app but the good thing about this book is that the author also tells you what code to write instead. But he doesn’t stop there, he gives even more examples of how to do it, every one getting better and better until finally presenting the best solution (that he knows of). It’s not a beginners book though. You should already know a fair bit about programming in my opinion to make use of the book.
Apart from that I started to try out a few operating systems I had never tried. First of all, Open Solaris, because I had read about the ZFS file system and that sounded like just the thing for me (I never do backups, my computer has 3 internal and 3 external harddrives, I do stupid stuff from time to time that messes up my system). ZFS makes it safe to work this way and being on the safe side is always a good idea, especially if it’s done automatically for you, because you are lazy of course.
Well, OpenSolaris did work. But it’s unbelievably slow. Takes three minutes to boot on my computer for example. And there is no version of Inkscape for Solaris (yet), which is one of the apps I use daily. Apart from the speed and the missing software Solaris was nice enough though, I’ll definatly look at it again in a year or two.
Then I tried out FreeBSD. Did install fine but there was so much trouble with the installed system that I just gave up pretty quickly after an hour or two. There are lots of people who did install and do use FreeBSD just fine so I don’t want to say FreeBSD is bad, it’s just that I, personally, wasn’t able to get it to work in a reasonable amount of time because I don’t know anything about BSD and didn’t want to invest too much time. I did not read the manual, I just skimmed over it, that probably explains it.
I hadn’t yet seen much of BSD though so I tried PC BSD which is based on FreeBSD but comes with a nice graphical installer and a working preconfigured desktop environment (KDE) so it should be usable right after installing without the need to configure everything first.
It installed fine, everything looked good, but then, after the first boot… A green screen with ugly lines, some text, everything garbled.. Trouble with my graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT). Don’t understand why since the graphical installer worked fine and was really fast, surprisingly so. PC BSD tried to use the open source radeon driver, which failed. I tried switching to vesa which took me a while to figure out how to do because it would just switch back to radeon, ignoring everything else. I also fiddled around for hours with a lot of X server settings. I came closer to a solution, but it just didn’t work completely. Fed up with ATI on Linux anyhow, I bought a cheap NVIDIA graphics card (9500 GT, 1024 MB GDDR2) that is slow enough to work in my old computer but at least a bit faster than my old graphics card so that it wouldn’t be a downgrade, and PC BSD finally booted into KDE.
KDE of course was a garbled mess made up of bugs. Don’t get me wrong, KDE is a nice idea and I admire the things that the KDE developers have achieved, some stuff is really cool, but KDE just doesn’t work for me. Never did. Apps are constantly crashing. It’s a bit better on Arch Linux, you rarely see something in KDE crash there. But with Kubuntu and PC BSD, apps are crashing all the time and that’s just something I can’t work with. Also, I can’t stand Dolphin, the file manager. I’m sure it’s perfect for a lot of people as is KDE but for me it’s pretty much unusable. There are some nice ideas that just don’t work in practice and make working with files harder than it should be. I think KDE can become something truly great but I also think that it will take another 5 to 10 years. Gnome and XFCE work right now so that’s what I use on my computers.
Installing software on PC BSD can be done in three ways. PBI files, which are like installers on Windows, those worked without problems but most of those PBI files I found are really old. Then there are binary packages, those didn’t work at all. And then there are ports, installing software from source. That worked fine. I’m writing this from PC BSD right now, I’m still trying it out. Like OpenSolaris it looks promising but isn’t usable yet from my point of view because I don’t want a system where apps are crashing all the time. KDE needs to get better or they need to switch to Gnome or XFCE and obviously there is something wrong with installing binary packages. Maybe there is a fix for that already on their forums, I haven’t looked there yet. Or maybe the download servers were just down yesterday. Dunno. I’ll try PC BSD for a while longer, see if there are fixes for the problems I encountered.
Next I wanted to try StormOS which is based on Nexenta Core. Nexenta is a combination of the OpenSolaris Kernel with the Ubuntu Linux userland, which sounds really interesting. StormOS didn’t let me install it to a partition though, it wanted the whole disk so I wasn’t able to install it. It didn’t work in VirtualBox for some reason. I hope to be able to try out StormOS at some point in the future, when I ever get the time to clean up a whole harddisk.
