A mono-free Ubuntu desktop

An interesting thing turned up with the latest release of Ubuntu.  The replacement of f-spot with shotwell along with the ppa for Synapse has freed me from my mono dependency.  Previously there was no way I was giving up gnome-do and I have a love-hate relationship with f-spot.  However, since I couldn't find anything I liked better, f-spot it is.

Now, no one is going to confuse me with RMS as far as free software goes.  I am not necessarily dumping mono because of any free software concerns.  I am all for making money if you can off writing software, and I don't ascribe to the idea that software is knowledge that should be shared with everyone.  In my opinion, software is knowledge applied, which inherently makes it the intellectual property of the person or people who applied it.  The thing that makes open source software so practical and,  by nature free, is the fact that many people collaborate, so many that you either need to form some type of organization out of the contributors if you are going to make the software proprietary, or you open source and give it away because it just isn't worth the trouble to determine ownership share and so on.   That's a decision that is solely the developers and shouldn't be anyone's business in terms of pressure to make it open or closed.

That being said, the practical nature of open source usually means a better product for a number of reasons, not the least of which are artificial timelines and resource limitations that software companies are hampered with.  Don't get me wrong at all, I love open source software; I love the collaboration, I love the fact that it's a way to reduce cost for businesses, and I love the fact that such good software is available.  Lets face it, there are a large number of small businesses around the world who simply couldn't compete without open source software.  I just don't like the idea that the community can enforce it's sometimes artificially moralistic sentiment that software should be free... which is usually formed by people who just want software for free(as in beer) and don't give a rip about freedom(as in speech).

So why do I care about getting rid of mono at all?  I just don't like useless crap on my machine.  One of these days I'll get around to writing the article on why C# was a stupid idea and basically a redundant language but, in essence, I have seen mono in the past as a means to an end, one of those means being real interaction with an exchange server.  However, hasn't become a reality and I don't think it will be.  So right now, aside from the two programs I have needed it for in the past, mono is mostly useless to me.

Anyway, since I did the update from 10.04 to 10.10 and I have been heavily reliant on gnome-do mono came along for the ride.  However, a recent article I read on Synapse made me realize that, with the addition of Shotwell, I have replacements for all the mono-dependent software on my machine.  So out with Tomboy, F-Spot, and Gnome-do.  In with GNote, Shotwell, and Synapse.  So far so good.  I don't find that I'm missing much if anything and it feels good to keep my system clean.

Moblin: The 'Almost there' GUI for Netbooks

The guys at Intel have one thing right, the average netbook user is probably going to be more interested in social networking, status, and media than writing papers and such.  It's just the nature of netbooks.  With Moblin, you are getting a very nice operating system with a lot of very smart things built in. 

That said, I think another review of Moblin is redundant.  What I think is more important is what is not in Moblin.  The major, glaring hole is Facebook.  I get Twitter and Last.fm(really?), but no Facebook? 

Second, synchronization, at least to Google AFYD, is poor.  I can't easily figure out how to sync my calendar, which is the idea of having a desktop that gives you the status of your world at all times.

Third, please, no more rpm/yum.  It is definitely better than it was, but apt is just better.  If not apt, then portage... but in my experience, you are always one step from dependency hell with yum.

Side note... where the heck is Gentoo in the netbook world?  It seems like there should be people raving over Gentoo on netbooks but there just isn't.  It seems like a perfect fit to me.

Ok, back to the list, 4th on the wish list is easier access to configuration.  It's not terribly clear to me where I go to configure the thing and it took about 5 minutes of poking around in the different screens before I found what I wanted.  One of the things I like about Ubuntu is that it's easy to find things.  For a user-level gui like Moblin seems to want to be, ability to find things should be one of the top priorities.

Fifth and final, it is not clear at all to me how to manage my session.  Shutdown, suspend, switch user, none of this seems to be available to me.  My wife and I both use the netbook, we need this to keep our preferences separate and so she can remain a user while I maintain admin rights.

But aside from those five things, I love the way the distro looks, I love the idea and where they seem to be headed.  I just find it a cool but useless distro until they add some of the basic features that I really need.  I guess it's back to UNR for me, at least for now.

Using MS SQL from Linux

As a programmer who works primarily on Linux machines, both on the desktop and server, I have found the number of free clients for SQL Server to be sparse at best.  There are a few... Squirrel SQL comes to mind as one.  Oracle SQL Developer works as well.  However, each of them have their difficulties.  I have had weird crashes with Squirrel and I can't use any of the advanced features in SQL Developer.  Such is the life of a linux based developer trying to work with the world of Windows.

One bright spot I discovered recently is SQSH.  It is essentially a shell for SQL Server that operates something like the shells for mysql or oracle that I am familiar with.  Why is that exciting at all you ask?  Ever tried to step through a large result set on the console?

The answer is, it's not so much the SQL part that is exciting, it's the shell part.  It's a real shell that goes beyond what is available in any of the other shells I am aware of.  Sure Oracle's SQLPlus will allow you to do variable substitution and some macros, but it's not nearly as powerful as sqsh.  In addition, you can use pipes!  That means, as I alluded to earlier,  you can step through large result sets by piping the output of a query to less just like you would in a linux or unix console.

You get flow control and even backgrounding.  So if you know a query is going to take a while, you can add an & to the end just like you would in a Linux shell and it will run in the background.

Here are all the features.  Even more awesome is the fact that it can be installed via apt-get on Ubuntu.  There is some extra setup required to make available the data sources you connect to, but it is very easy to get going quickly.

Just another tool for your developer toolbox.