A Fresh Start?

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

As a software developer with a background in hardware it is always interesting and often painful to setup a new work environment. As it happens to be a sunny spring day (good friday almost easter) it seem that the theme of renewal is here. Coincidentally my old Dell precision workstation (circa 2004, perhaps the first 64-bit machine i ever used) has finally died.

Over the past few years I have bee running Ubuntu as my primary desktop working environment. This is probably the reason I to so much milage out of the old system. Each time someone else’s Dell precision workstation died, I would cannibalize the good parts and add them to my system. Net result is that for a grand total of $65 (for a galaxy force 6500 video card, an old but awesome card appropriate for the old system)  I had a great 2 dual core cpu’s (4 total), 24G memory and about 1 terabyte of disk space dual monitor developer workstation. So what happened? One of the three old fans died probably about a month ago but ubuntu didn’t care, it kept on ticking. eventually I needed to use the dvd drive for something and noticed it was dead, so eventually I powered down the system to check it out. And that was all she wrote. Funny thing is that although it was obvious that some of the insides had issues, the hard drives (2 beautiful SATA drives) were just fine. Oh well.

So I removed the good parts and scrapped the old system and ordered a new one. You know what, sometimes new is really better. I ordered up a Dell Optiplex 7010. with 3rd Gen Intel Core I7 (quad core, bug cache, real fast) so basically a 8 cpu machine with 16G of memory, 2TB disk, no monitors no fluff  for about $800 bucks.  It came in today so I ware ready to go to work on it.

On boot I got a brand new super clean version of window 7 running. I quickly configured the dual monitors and that I thought about how to configure the machine for real. After think about it for a while I decided there was no real reason torero what was done and as long as I am vigilant in the way I use the host (in this case windows 7) it should service as a great platform for development. So I painfully located all my windows application license codes for the basic stuff. For me this means Google Chrome, Dropbox.  Office 2010 (64-bit), Adobe Acrobat and virtualization software (I typically use virtual box). A few hours I finish installing the latest UBUNTU as a guest and start using it. AND it sucks. What—–

It just doesn’t feel right to me. Several discussions later and I realize it. Linux or OS X on the bottom is always the way to go. So now what. I guess I can use something to suck up my windows drive and virtualize it. Or may be I should go right ahead and boot Linux from a different physical drive. Then I can use the actual physical drive (with windows as the guest) and maybe that won’t suck at all. By the way I’ve also had a great deal of success using the latest wine stuff, so maybe I can look at that as a another option.

Funny thing about the story is that while I sit here waiting for all the file transfer/shuffling to finish (I needed to rearrange some of the stuff in disk) I am typing on my mac using its notes app. I really just use my mac and don’t ever really think about it.  So thats it for now I wait:

“Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.” – Sarah Ban Breathnach