Installing Debian on a Dell Mini 10

A few notes largely for my own benefit.

We already have a couple of Debian machines in our house (one physical and one virtual), but I wanted to get to grips with installing it on a machine that has some fairly unusual hardware.

All in all it was a smooth install. I created a USB installer with UNetbootin, and installed the base system without issue. It didn’t find my broadcom wireless card, but after enabling all repositories and installing the driver (search for B43 in synaptic) I had a good wireless connection and was able to unplug the ethernet cable.

I then upgraded to a 3.2 kernel, and enabled Mozilla’s Debian repository to get an up to date version of Iceweasel. Both of these went smoothly as well.

The only outstanding issue is the trackpad. The 3.2 kernel has helped a lot, but it is still a little jumpy at times. But it was also a little jumpy under Ubuntu on occasion as well, so I’m not too worried.

Debian runs well on this machine. It seems noticeably faster than Ubuntu, and boot time is significantly faster. If I could sort out the trackpad properly then I would certainly rely on this machine for short trips and coffee-shop web browsing, and it’s nice to see a low-powered and quite old computer running smoothly again.

What I’m using to get the job done in 2012

A couple of years ago I documented the hardware and software I use as a homage to http://usesthis.com. I thought it was probably time to update it.

I’ve been working with Macs and with OS X for most of the past 18 months. As a result of this, most of my hardware has shifted from generic Dell and Sony machines running Linux, to Macs running OS X. I still maintain a couple of physical Ubuntu/Debian machines, but mostly virtualise now, especially as by using powerful Apple hardware I can create VMs that are significantly more powerful than their physical counterparts.

I do most of my work on either a Macbook Pro or Macbook Air, both of which were the absolute bottom-of-the-range at the time they were purchased. I generally have one of these machines with me wherever I am. I also have access to a more powerful Mac desktop, as well as several VMs covering OS X, Windows, Debian and Ubuntu.

At home I have a 2011 Mac Mini, a generic monitor, and the same keyboard and mouse I was using 5 years ago. I back everything up to a large external hard drive and a NAS device that also streams media to an ancient Mac connected to the TV in the living room. I also have several laptops set up for specific purposes, but am in the process of moving everything important onto a series of VMs hosted on the Mac Mini.

I also have a Kindle 4 (the £89 no frills model), and am really enjoying being able to read books on the train without breaking my back or zapping the battery on my phone.

Since I went truly cross-platform, I’ve simplified things a fair bit. I use Chrome (home) and Firefox (work) for browsing, and use Google’s web-based apps for pretty much everything. At work I use Microsoft Office 2011 for those things that require it, but am getting to the point where I can be fully productive with a web browser and a terminal session. This makes moving between Mac OS X and Ubuntu easy, as does having everything I’m working on in Dropbox so that as long as I’m on one of my machines I can sync my changes back home instantly.

I think if I was starting again with setting up what I needed to make me truly productive, I’d go for a maxed out Macbook Air coupled with a 27″ Thunderbolt display in every place I worked. I’d also want a Debian or Ubuntu server to deal with backups, storage, and working on Linux specific tasks. None of this is out of the question, but is hard to justify until the machines I currently use cease to be of use.

Looking back and looking further forward

By this time tomorrow I will have successfully implemented the support of Mac OS X in my workplace. It’s been a long 14 month slog, but I’ve learned a lot about Macs, project management, and a fair few things beside. I’ve also lived pretty much wholly in Mac OS X since April 2011, which scared me at first but now feels oddly familiar.

Next up will be iOS and Linux. iOS is a new thing for me, but Linux certainly isn’t, and it was quite soothing today to open up my Linux laptop and do my first bit of Ubuntu work for nearly a year.  I’ve also (finally) given up Gnome 2, and after a brief dalliance with Gnome 3 have decided that Unity is the interface that I’ll use on all my Linux machines from now on.

Not that I’m giving up my Macs though. Unity and OS X are actually quite similar in a lot of ways, and I see both of them featuring heavily in both my personal and professional future.

Albums of the year – 2011

These are the 30 records I couldn’t live without in 2011. Some more than others, but they all deserve a mention.

  1. The Indelicates – David Koresh Superstar
  2. Destroyer – Kaputt
  3. Radiohead – The King of Limbs
  4. Elbow – Build a Rocket Boys!
  5. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake
  6. Marissa Nadler – Marissa Nadler
  7. The Twilight Singers – Dynamite Steps
  8. British Sea Power – Valhalla Dancehall
  9. Luke Haines – 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling Of The 1970s and Early 80s
  10. 8in8 – Nighty Night
  11. Frank Turner – England Keep My Bones
  12. Craft Spells – Idle Labor
  13. Veronica Falls – Veronica Falls
  14. Widowspeak – Widowspeak
  15. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints
  16. Wilco – The Whole Love
  17. Toro Y Moi – Underneath The Pine
  18. Anna Calvi – Anna Calvi
  19. Amanda Palmer – Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under
  20. Akron/Family – S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT
  21. Timber Timbre – Creep On Creepin’ On
  22. The Horrible Crowes – Elsie
  23. Dum Dum Girls – Always in Dreams
  24. Grails – Deep Politics
  25. Mogwai – Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
  26. The Horrors – Skying
  27. Tori Amos – Night Of Hunters
  28. Soft Metals – Soft Metals
  29. Los Campesinos! – Hello Sadness
  30. The Decemberists – The King Is Dead

New ways of working

My day job is currently taking me deep into the heart of Mac OS X. It’s not a bad place to be, but it requires me to think in a slightly different way. Thankfully I don’t really have to touch Windows at the moment, which means I’m only bouncing between OS X and Linux, which isn’t too far to jump, and feels quite comfortable now.

This slight shift in focus has lead to a shift in the hardware and software I use, and I’ve found myself (finally) using the GMail interface more and more for email, and  almost reaching the point where I do pretty much everything through a browser of some sort. I’ve also used about 10 different Macs over the last 6 months, so might get round to writing some sort of comparison post at some point.

Oh, and the other change in the way I work comes from Google+, which seems to be the place where I post videos and babble about music.

First thoughts on Google+

I’m liking Google+ a lot so far. It looks like Google have taken everything they learned from Buzz and Wave, everything they’ve borrowed from Facebook, and a few other nice features, and rolled them together into something I think I’ll probably use quite a lot.

I like the idea of Circles in particular. I know a lot of people from all sorts of different places, and I like the idea of being able to aggregate their posts for my benefit, whilst easily segregating what I write so that it only reaches interested parties. I know other social networking sites do this to some extent, but this is the best application of that feature I’ve come across so far.

A is for Accident, but also for Amanda

I’m not sure how I missed this one.

The Dresden Dolls live album A is for Accident (Collected live recordings 2001-2003) is available to download on a pay-what-you-want model from here. In this case “what you want” can also mean free, so you really have no excuse if you like their music.

You can also download their eponymous debut album under the same model from here. This one is definitely worth paying something for.

Kickstarter and other interesting funding models

Kickstarter is a website where fans of artists and musicians can fund new records or performances, in return for receiving advance copies of the art form in question.  It is a funding model that interests me, and it gives me quite a buzz to receive advance copies of records I would have bought anyway, with the knowledge that I played some sort of part in creating them. The latest record to come out having been funded via this method is Marissa Nadler’s eponymous album, which is a really beautiful collection of songs.

I’m also quite intrigued with how the Kaiser Chiefs are releasing their new record, and have already bought my version of it.

teknostatik

A productive first day of my holiday

Today was a day for doing computer-related things. I’ve had a brief play with Gnome 3 and Unity (again), and still found both of them getting in my way a lot more than I’m used to. I will persevere though, because I figure that eventually I’ll end up using one or the other, and could actually do with knowing about both.

I also took advantage of having my very fast work laptop with me and built a few virtual machines as part of a personal project that I’ll write about in more detail at some point soon. Suffice to say, using the Macbook Pro was remarkably painless, and it really does offer a viable Unix development environment, especially when working with Virtualbox (which I work with a lot). I’m also 75% towards getting Unity and Gnome 3 running virtually (both have fairly steep graphics requirements), and I’m hopeful I’ll be able to build something that other people could use before the end of my Easter break.

Apart from that I’ve done very little, but have plans for the next two days so should be out and about a bit more.