Patrick’s Musings

I’ve been reading with interest Tony Pearson’s blog Inside System Storage as the IBM view on things is often very different to the EMC/NetApp/Everyone Else view on things.

The last two posts have been about getting a new laptop, and all the effort Tony has gone to getting all his data synched (he is currently searching for a crossover cable).

When I received a new laptop at EMC, not because the company automatically replaced them after 4 years, but rather because the hinge snapped about a week after the warranty expired, I had some similar issues, thuogh certainly not 134 applications to reinstall.

As an early adopter of Dropbox all my important files are synchronised with the cloud. Anything customer sensitive that I couldn’t host online was kept on a Truecrypt encrypted USB key that lives on my keychain. (It used to live in my pocket, but after two trips through the washing machine I moved it to the keychain (If you’re interested it’s a Patriot XPorter XT)).

So old laptop boots up a Darik’s Boot & Nuke and starts wiping. The new laptop boots up the corporate image which I promptly transfer into a vmware image using vmware converter. I then install my OS of choice, which was the Windows 7 beta at the time, VMware server & Dropbox. An hour later (using LAN sync and getting the data off my desktop not the Dropbox server) I have all my files back. I then install my base applications that I cannot live without, Firefox, Launchy, PeaZip, Java, Acrobat Viewer, PDF Printer, Open Office & Truecrypt to start.

I could have saved an hour and just installed Dropbox in the corporate image, but where is the fun in that. I currently have 3 desktop computers & 2 laptops. Thanks to Dropbox I always have my files. I can even access them from my Android phone bringing support to a total of 4 operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac, Android.

Gracefully delete the mailq when you don’t want to just delete the files.
for i in `(mailq |grep '<' |awk '{print $3}')` ;do exim -Mrm $i; done

Run as root of course.

Just a quick list of the things that I believe Xorg really needs to be able to do before I could put it on a laptop for my mother.

1. Auto-detect monitors and adjust the config as needed. (You know, just like Windows does).
2. Not need a restart of GDM (XDM, KDM or whatever) to do this.
3. Have a quick simple key combination to lock the window.
4. Have Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) set down for ALL desktop environments, at least for things like hotkeys. alt-F2 in Metacity should do the same in Enlightenment should do the same in KDE
5. Emulate Windows. No don’t scream; any Windows user that sits down at a Linux terminal would expect the Windows key to be the magical meta key, Windows-R should open a run dialog etc. See note above about a HIG

I’m sure I’ll get hounded for this, but that’s a bare minimum of what my mother expects from a computer. It should look the same as all other computers, it should act the same.

6. On a personal note. It should be fully themeable and skinable. I don’t want my computer to look like Windows, but by default, it’s probably not a bad idea.