I’ve spent much of my time over the last week migrating from Windows to Ubuntu on my Thinkpad T60. I’ve fiddled with linux off an on over the past 5 years (I did write the linux rpm installer for WSAD-IE v5) and did the majority of the linux testing for that release, so I was familiar with RedHat and SuSE.
I guess since those many years ago, Ubuntu has become the platform of choice and it’s easy to see why. I was able to load the CD onto my USB 2GB key drive and boot it up to play around. It also includes a powerful disk repartition program in the same vein as Partition Magic. I was able to split my primary 120GB hard drive formatted as NTFS in half without disturbing windows, so currently, I dual-boot as needed.
I could go on and on about the features of Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) but you can view them all over the internet. If you plan on doing this migration on a thinkpad, check out the thinkwiki. It’s an awesome resource for thinkpads.
I have my VMs with Windows WID et al running just fine under Linux. I’ve also gone and installed the Linux native version of WID to my laptop directly. The reason I was using VMs was more about how a windows machine slowly chokes itself over the registry. I don’t think Linux has this issue, so I don’t see a point in running Linux in Linux.
My current issues with it include:
- ipod support. There’s no itunes for Linux for some reason, so you are left with Banshee or Rhythmbox neither of which I could figure out yet.
- Battery Drain. Linux seems to consume way more wattage than windows does. There is a handy utility called powerTop created by intel that allows you see what is waking up the CPU and what powersaving state it is in. Currently, I can’t really get my idle laptop with LCD screen at min and wiress connection below 18w.
- Notes Support. You have to use Notes 8.5 but sometimes my .id file doesn’t get recognized by notes and I can’t check my work mail. Also, I used to use NotesBuddy which doesn’t exist on Linux.Therefore, I use my blackberry and it’s unlimited data plan for my lightweight notes client.
If you haven’t checked out Linux for a few years, I think it may be time to go back. I’d say you still need to have that computer-oriented mind (so no migrating your mother yet) but if you are willing to occasionally browse google for a solution to your problem, it’s worth it.
As you know I made the move also – been having a b*#&h of a time installing IBM SW though including MQ and Message Broker… disappointing so it looks like I may have to run Windoze in VM on a linux host.
although not in any ways ‘officially’ supported, i’ve been running the windows version of notes 7 in wine successfully for about a year now. it’s memory requirements are much more reasonable than the linux version of notes versions 7-8.
I have been thinking about migrating to Linux on my T61, but my only issue is whether I will be able to install WID or RAD on it. I was able to install RAD on CentOS VM but not on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Did you have any issues when migrating?
I have WID 6.1 installed on Hardy Heron. I believe I had to install it via RPM since there are no debian packages.
When it started, it also didn’t give me a business integration perspective. I had to run wid -initialize and wid -clean to get that to work.
Great. Thanks for the information. I will first sandbox it on my Ubuntu desktop and then try it on my laptop.
Dan, as I understand it IBM still only officially supports WID on SUSE and RedHat.
But I’ve also been quite impressed with Ubuntu 9.04 and recently installed it, and figured I’d give WID 6.2. a try on it.
So far I can’t say it been a 100% success. After performing the “file handle” incrementation-stuff I’ve managed to get WID running, however the installation seems to have failed in the creation of WPS profiles.
So basically my question is: Although IBM does not currently support Ubuntu, do you happen to know how what one has to do to get WID (and the ITE wps) installed correctly on ubuntu?
Seems you have got 6.1 running on Ubuntu 8.10?