Last September when my VAIO Hard Drive gave up on me after 7 years of great service, I decided to replace it with an SDD. I then installed Ubuntu 14.04 on it and that aging Core 2 Duo turned into a blazing race horse. As my daughter needs a PC for her school work and Ubuntu is still a geeky platform, I got her a Lenovo i5, Win 10 laptop. Early last month when we decided to relocate to India, I gifted myself my first MacBook Pro.
So now I have a wide spectrum OS to choose from and I'm facing the challenges and conveniences of owning each. One thing I've learned is that while Ubuntu has come a long way in terms of catching up with the peers, the moment you stray from standard script, you need to roll up your sleeves and get into DIY mode.
The first challenge I faced was setting up my Canon Printer MX4240 on Ubuntu. Though drivers are there, the set up is far from straight forward. It took me a couple of days to get it hooked up to the printer with a lot of trial and error. Even after I was able to set it up, the print speeds were terrible.
The good part was I could install Skype, Chrome and Drop Box without any issues. The email client Thunderbird worked quite well. I occasionally miss MS word and Excel but mostly, I'm able to get by with Libre Office. I set up Eclipse and Filezilla and MySQL bench and I was mostly whole again untill last week when I decided to configure MS OneDrive. Unlike DropBox, it does not have a release for Ubuntu for obvious reasons. So I again had to scout for external solutions. I downloaded a project called OneDrive-d from Github, built it and installed it only to figure out the challenges. As this is an amateur offering, the sync is 2 way. Working with 120GB SDD I do not want a two way sync at all. I want to upload whatever is in my sync folder on Ubuntu to OneDrive and view all the uploaded files on Onedrive. But I do not want to download them, unless I need them. Such fine grained use cases are not available on OneDrive-d. Also, the sync program fails too often. Finally I shut the door on it.
Couple of days back I got myself a Time Capsule. I tried setting it up on my Mac and it was such as breeze, I was surprised. It just worked.
But I wanted my Windows Laptop and Ubuntu to work as well. It seems Airport Utility for Windows is all but abandoned. I downloaded 5.6 version and used it to set up sync for my MS profile. But that needed restart of the Time Capsule. That wasn't so great. But still okay. Now that I want to set up Access for my wife and daughter, I will need to reboot the TC a couple of more times. On the other hand One Drive utility on Mac works just fine...
Configuring Ubuntu was a battle of completely different magnitude. The couple of options available on the net are helpful but incomplete. Mounting a drive using mount-cifs was a learning. The /etc/fstab file configuration and the challenges of using the right options made this a long and arduous journey. Finally when I could finally mount it, it would not let me write. It took me a lot of tinkering to finally get the combination right.
//192.168.1.xxx/Data /media/timecapsule cifs password=xxxx,sec=ntlm,user,rw,noperm,forceuid 0 0
Later when I tried copying some of the photographs from Ubuntu to TC, I was shocked at the poor transfer rates of hardly 500kbps. Any how it was done and I heaved a sigh of relief.
I get it. I love the Vaio. Can't let go of it. Whatever it takes to keep it within the family. If it means I have to endure the lack of Ubuntu Ecosystem, so be it!
So now I have a wide spectrum OS to choose from and I'm facing the challenges and conveniences of owning each. One thing I've learned is that while Ubuntu has come a long way in terms of catching up with the peers, the moment you stray from standard script, you need to roll up your sleeves and get into DIY mode.
The first challenge I faced was setting up my Canon Printer MX4240 on Ubuntu. Though drivers are there, the set up is far from straight forward. It took me a couple of days to get it hooked up to the printer with a lot of trial and error. Even after I was able to set it up, the print speeds were terrible.
The good part was I could install Skype, Chrome and Drop Box without any issues. The email client Thunderbird worked quite well. I occasionally miss MS word and Excel but mostly, I'm able to get by with Libre Office. I set up Eclipse and Filezilla and MySQL bench and I was mostly whole again untill last week when I decided to configure MS OneDrive. Unlike DropBox, it does not have a release for Ubuntu for obvious reasons. So I again had to scout for external solutions. I downloaded a project called OneDrive-d from Github, built it and installed it only to figure out the challenges. As this is an amateur offering, the sync is 2 way. Working with 120GB SDD I do not want a two way sync at all. I want to upload whatever is in my sync folder on Ubuntu to OneDrive and view all the uploaded files on Onedrive. But I do not want to download them, unless I need them. Such fine grained use cases are not available on OneDrive-d. Also, the sync program fails too often. Finally I shut the door on it.
Couple of days back I got myself a Time Capsule. I tried setting it up on my Mac and it was such as breeze, I was surprised. It just worked.
But I wanted my Windows Laptop and Ubuntu to work as well. It seems Airport Utility for Windows is all but abandoned. I downloaded 5.6 version and used it to set up sync for my MS profile. But that needed restart of the Time Capsule. That wasn't so great. But still okay. Now that I want to set up Access for my wife and daughter, I will need to reboot the TC a couple of more times. On the other hand One Drive utility on Mac works just fine...
Configuring Ubuntu was a battle of completely different magnitude. The couple of options available on the net are helpful but incomplete. Mounting a drive using mount-cifs was a learning. The /etc/fstab file configuration and the challenges of using the right options made this a long and arduous journey. Finally when I could finally mount it, it would not let me write. It took me a lot of tinkering to finally get the combination right.
//192.168.1.xxx/Data /media/timecapsule cifs password=xxxx,sec=ntlm,user,rw,noperm,forceuid 0 0
Later when I tried copying some of the photographs from Ubuntu to TC, I was shocked at the poor transfer rates of hardly 500kbps. Any how it was done and I heaved a sigh of relief.
I get it. I love the Vaio. Can't let go of it. Whatever it takes to keep it within the family. If it means I have to endure the lack of Ubuntu Ecosystem, so be it!
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