Windows or Linux

I was browsing through my stats on Blogger.com and realised that the majority of viewers are browsing this blog post using a windows machine.

The shares are heavily for Windows with >70% of visitors on Windows machines, and only 11% on a Linux machine.

So I had a thought of whether some of links to my old posts were still hanging around somewhere - during the times when I was mainly on Windows. Or whether some of the visitors are considering move from Windows to Linux.

If you are a Windows user considering a move to Linux, then my advice to you is to - Do It. My experience with the shift to Linux has been gradual - over 10 years in fact. I was using linux in the Wild  West days where everything had to compiled and you had to work out some cryptic dependency. For some of these reasons I would often give up and move back to Windows - where everything for the most part just worked.

Some of the most trivial things in Linux was pain staking effort - for example sound and graphics. The distributions that are out these days are nothing like what you may have experienced in the past. In my last effort I was trying to get Parallels or VMware to work, but no matter what I did I kept on getting an error. I remember posting on their official forum for help and I didn't hear anything from them. So I ditched Linux and went back to Windows.

I still feel that although there is a lot of effort put into providing distributions, to applications etc... some of which seems a little less polished than Windows or a proprietary software - I guess there's more money in getting it to be polished. But, if you look past the vanilla install and see the potential then you would be in for a treat.

I also feel that the MacBook Pro with OSX helped me get over Windows -  for the sheer fact that OSX was feature less than Windows  yet just as polished as Windows - when I say feature less what I mean is the applications that are available etc... please don't send me hate mail. Secondly, Google with Google docs and Google Mail was also partly responsible to help me get off Windows.

For most of the software that is available in Windows there will be equally or better software available in Linux - the best part is that most Linux software are free. If you would like to see a list of equivalent software check out this link : http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20070701111340544/Equivalents.html, granted that it is a little old but you get the jist ?

However, there are some software that I cannot be without. For example - I'm a .NET programmer living in a world of shame Linux, I need my VisualStudio goodness. I'm also an armature photographer, so I like Photoshop - although there is GIMP but I feel more comfortable in Adobes proprietary goodness. When I have a need for Windows, I launch up VirtualBox and run a Virtual Machine instance of Windows (instead of the other way round - most of the time).

Either way, thanks for visiting and I hope you are getting something out of my posts.

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Using RDP in Linux and Remmina RDP client for Linux

The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is widely used in Microsoft Windows, originally it was introduced as Terminal Services. Essentially it allows you to control a computer remotely (i.e via another computer), you can almost do anything via RDP. When I first switched from Windows to Linux, I had found that this feature was greatly missing from Linux's array and features.

My initial questions about RDP was met with VNC as the solution. If anyone has tried VNC you may notice that it is considerably slow-er than RDP. Not only that, but the person in front of the computer that you are controlling will see exactly what you are doing. When you are at home, this is not a problem, but RDP definately offers a better package.

Recently I was advised to use xRDP,  it is RDP for X. To get xrdp its a simple process, all you have to do is punch in the following command:

sudo apt-get install xrdp

Once this is installed, all you have to do is fire-up your RDP client. This will work with the Windows RDP client on Mac and Windows. If your other client is a linux machine, then try Remmina. It's a fantastic client - but it's the first one that I've tried.

To install Remmina, again whip out your Terminal window and punch the following command:

sudo apt-get install remmina

Once you have installed remmina launch it the same way that you would normally launch an application in Linux, you will be greeted with the following screen:

Adding Hosts
The first thing you are going to have to do is add a host, to do this click on the Page icon with a green plus symbol. This is the second icon on the toolbar in the above image.

From here you are able to set the details to connect to the RDP server, I'm not going to cover all the options instead I'll cover the options that you will need to set to get you started:

1. Name - This is name of the computer that you want to connect to, this does not need to be the actual name that has been assigned to the host computer. You can choose any name that would best describe the computer and differentiate it from the others (if you plan on having multiple hosts). In my case I've set it as Secondary Computer.
2. Group - Leave this as it is - empty.
3. Protocol - Select RDP - Remote Desktop Protocol this should have already been selected for you.
4. Server - Enter the IP address of the computer, this can be an internal IP address if the computer is on the local network, or an external IP address. In my case the server is on the internal network so I've entered 192.168.1.4. 
5. User name - Enter the username that you wish to log onto your host computer. In my case I've entered myusername for demonstration purposes. 
6. Password - Enter the password for the username
7. Domain - Leave blank if required, or enter a Domain. 
8. Resolution - Either select Use client resolution or if you want to set the resolution select Custom and then select the appropriate resolution from the drop-down. In my case I've opted to use the client's resolution. 
9. Colour Depth - Select the appropriate colour depth. This is an important selection, if you select the default option of 256 colours (8bpp) and your default background is Hi-Res then you will start to see some funky colours and it is generally unworkable. I've chosen True Colour (32 bpp) to allow my hi-res wallpaper/background to be displayed. If you are on a slower connection or if you are connecting to an external machine outside of your network you may need to reduce the number of colours. 

Once you have populated the fields, you can click on Save to save your changes. You should see your entry :

You may need to repeat the above steps if you have multiple hosts. 

Editing a host

If you realise that you have entered the incorrect information, simply edit the host details by:

1. Select the host and then clicking on the pencil icon on the toolbar, or
2. Right click on the host and select Edit from the context menu

Connecting to your Host

Once you have your hosts set up, to connect to a host you can either:

1. Double click on a host
2. Select the host and click on the first icon in the toolbar - I'm not sure what the icon looks like. 
3. Right click on the host and choose Connect from the context menu

When you connect to a host the first window that will appear will let you know that it is attempting to connect :

Then, once it is connected it will go through a loading procedure that is visible to you:

Once this is loaded, the connection log window will either automatically disappear or simply click on OK.

Thanks

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SAMBA: Unable to Mount

I was working on my HTPC today and I was trying to transfer files to it. After re-installing everything due to the 3TB debacle, I realised that I hadn't set up anything for connecting to it and sharing files. So my initial thought was to get FTP up and running, after while I thought to myself that I need to get SAMBA up and running.

I quickly whipped up Google to get some instructions on how to do this, since I was terrible at remembering how to do this - I have battle scars of the early days of samba as well.

The tutorial that I was going through took me through the process of setting up samba via a terminal window, which was great because I was able to Telnet into the machine to set everything up. Before long I started to run into some problems. So I quickly got an rdp session going to try and work things out graphically...

After about an hour I had a persistent problem of my desktop computer failing to connect :

This message "Unable to mount location" followed by "Failed to mount Windows share" kept on haunting me for that full hour...

Then I was looking up info on page 10 or 11 of a google search result, that's right I was in the deapths of a google search results - and I found a gem of an advice in a forum : check the permissions.

So I did, and my permission for the directory that I was sharing was drwx------... so I quickly whiped out my terminal in the rdp session and punched out:
sudo chmod 755 myDirectory

and then bam! all good. I can now connect to the Samba Share!!!

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Linux Download Manager

I've been asked this a couple of times in IRC channels as to whether there is a download manager for linux... and the answer is usually a "yeah ofcourse, this is linux". The download manager that I use is Uget, and it works pretty well for my purposes which is fairly basic (download, pause, resume). I remember that when I was on the Windows and Mac, I had to purchase this type of software, however, on Linux it's FREE. Love it.

To install it, and like with most packages, open up a terminal session and type in:

 sudo apt-get install uget 

And, that's it.

I'll add some screenshots later.

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