Stephen McDonald

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of removing my final Windows install after wiping my machine at work and installing Ubuntu on it. It was during the late 90s that I first tried out Linux after getting my hands on a Redhat 6.1 CD from the cover of a magazine I’d bought. I didn’t keep it installed for very long and after a few more tries over the years with Mandrake (now Mandrivia) and Damn Small Linux, it wasn’t until 2005 when I installed Slackware 10.2 as my primary operating system at home and really cut my teeth on it in order to test how cross-platform my Python projects were. It was a great experience learning about all the various sub-systems, compiling software and libraries from source, embracing the command line and modifying some of the internal scripts to get things working the way I wanted.

Fast forward to 2010 and in my workplace the migration from a Microsoft development shop to a Linux/Python shop after several years is finally complete, paving the way for this latest install. I did experience a couple of hiccups that hadn’t happened before. Firstly I have dual wide-screen monitors at work and I rotate one of them 90 degrees in order to maximize the amount of visible code on my screen. The display properties in Ubuntu only gave me the ability to flip the display 180 degrees which seemed quite odd so I then tried to manually rotate the display with the xrandr command which reported my overall virtual screen size as being too small for the rotation. I resolved this with the update below to my x.org configuration to use a virtual screen size large enough to handle the rotation while including the second monitor.

Section "Screen"
    Identifier "Configured Screen Device"
    Device "Configured Video Device"
    SubSection "Display"
        Virtual 2880 1440
    EndSubSection
EndSection

The second issue was more a lack of foresight on my part than a problem with the new install itself. After a vanilla install of any modern operating system you’ll undoubtedly be required to download a series of updates that have occurred since the version you’ve installed was initially released. The difference with most Linux distributions is that almost all of your software is managed in this way from installing to updating, it all goes through the same service known as a package manager - one of the many things with Linux that once you’re used to using you won’t know how you ever worked without it. So away I went with the initial round of updates which left the package manager busy for several hours, during which time some issues arose with a project that immediately required my attention. Unfortunately I needed to install a handful of libraries to get up and running and with the package manager busy I was left in a real bind. Fortunately I was able to use one of our test servers remotely to resolve the issue but the lesson learnt here is that for a new development system it’s best to leave the initial system update until after your development environment is completely set up.