The Back Burner

Every January, assorted pundits claim, “This is the year Linux will conquer the desktop!” Every year, they are proved wrong, and Windows continues to power 95% of desktop PCs (web servers are another matter; a very sizable majority of those run some flavour of Unix).

Well, my experience so far suggests that Linux is ready for the desktop — kind of. Using Xandros for everyday tasks is barely distinguishable from using Windows, and many mainstream PC users would be quite happy with it. I had no trouble at all finding replacements for mainstream Windows applications; Xandros comes with pretty much everything you need out of the box. For someone who makes fairly basic use of an office suite, as I do, the free Open Office is a more than adequate replacement for Microsoft Office, and it will save in Microsoft formats, so you can continue to exchange documents with MS Office users.

As for web browsers, you are spoilt for choice — the only unavailable choice, of course, being Microsoft’s very own Internet Explorer! I carried on using Opera, just as I did on Windows, but I could have chosen Firefox or Konqueror. Email was slightly more difficult, since Eudora, the indispensable email client I’ve been using since 1996, is only available for Windows and Mac. I tried Thunderbird, the companion email program to Firefox, didn’t like it, and ended up using Opera’s built-in email facility. It’s idiosyncratic but it has some interesting features, including threading and excellent search and filtering capabilities. For those wedded to Outlook, Evolution is said to be a good alternative.

I’ve already covered text editors in a previous post — Quanta Plus is simply the best editor I’ve ever used, on any platform. Linux has a built-in firewall, and as for anti-virus — I don’t bother!

All of those cover about 90% of my daily work. But what I find I really miss from Windows is the selection of handy little utilities I’d accumulated over the years, that chugged unobtrusively away in the background, helping me manage my workload. It’s turned out to be very hard to find good open-source replacements for these. Of course I could run them using Windows emulation software, but this seems to me to defeat the object of switching. Coming up next: my review of utilities I’ve discovered so far.

A few years ago, when dynamic, interactive websites were not as common as they are now, we decided to showcase our database skills by setting up a simple demonstration website that would allow site visitors to edit the content online. Looking around for some suitable application I hit on my small collection of recipes that I’d been emailing to friends, and the Archetype recipe database was born.

I created two versions — the “play” versions, that visitors could edit, and a live uneditable version that contained myoriginal recipes. I’ve since found it a genuinely useful application — when I find a recipe in a magazine or on a website that I particularly like, I add it to the website and I can then easily find it again, no matter where I am.

But rather embarrassingly, it seems a lot of other people find it useful too. Our website is supposed to promote our web design services, but the recipe pages have become by far the most popular on the site — without bringing in hordes of prospects eager for us to make them a dynamic website too! Looking at the stats for search terms used to find our site is revealing:

… and so it goes on. I’m sure it can’t do our site much good in the search engines, in terms of ranking highly for web design!

But perhaps I should see this as an opportunity. When I realised how popular these pages were, I thought I might as well put some Amazon ads on them, but those have earned me about one cookbook every three years. Now I’ve decided to try putting Google AdSense ads on them — we’ll see if those do any better. So it’s turned out to be a useful space for experimentation with revenue models, and it helps me get aninsight into the economics of web publishing.

More generally, looking at the terms people use to find your site can be a useful exercise. It may alert you to new services you could offer them, if they are searching for products and services related to your business, but which you don’t currently offer. Hmm, on this evidence maybe we should start bottling and selling lemon butter sauce …

A well-known fact about the history of the microcomputer is that it took a “killer application” to make it worth buying a PC: something so useful that it justified the cost of the computer. Back in the early 1980s, that killer app was Visicalc, the first-ever spreadsheet application, which had Apple II computers pouring off the shelves, snapped up by eager accountants.

In a similar way, my Xandros PC sat on the spare desk, providing a development web server and little else, until I found my very own killer app which justified moving that PC onto my desk and dumping the Windows PC on the spare one. The application that did this for me was Quanta Plus — a web editor.

A web editor? But there are dozens of great web editors for Windows! Surely you don’t need Linux just to run an editor? Well, it’s not quite as simple as that. I spend nearly all my working hours editing program code in a text editor — no fancy WYSIWYG tools for me. Since 1993 and Windows 3.1, that editor has been TextPad, which had got welded into the core of my being. I tried other, allegedly superior text editors from time to time but somehow I just couldn’t get along with them and always found myself back with simple, reliable, uncluttered TextPad. It wasn’t perfect, further development seemed to have ground to a halt, but I knew every quirk and feature and it was tuned for just one job — editing text files quickly and efficiently. In fact it was one reason the Linux box was still on the spare desk — I tried half a dozen Linux editors and didn’t like any of them.

Then in October a student on an Open University course I teach said that he couldn’t imagine creating web pages without Quanta. Out of curiosity I visited the site and thought it was worth a try.

I was just starting work on a large PHP website, so it seemed sensible to try Quanta for this. I started it up, had a quick scan through the help files, and set up my first project. Two hours later I was completely hooked. It was one of those rare occasions when you find an application that thinks exactly the way you do. It was the “tipping point” … and within days the Linux box was on my desk with Windows relegated to the outer darkness.

It is interesting to see how something you never knew you needed can prove itself indispensable!

I’ve had a spare computer by my side running Linux for a couple of years now. I started out with a very old, slow PC that struggled to run an ancient version of Red Hat Linux. It was unusable as a desktop machine, but did the job as a development web server for testing sites before unleashing them onto a live server.

When I upgraded my desktop PC (or rather Steve bought a new PC and I got his cast-off, the normal pattern in our office) I decided it was a good opportunity to try Linux on a more realistic platform: my discarded 733 MHz Pentium III. I didn’t want to spend days fiddling about trying to get things working though, so after due research online I plumped for recently-released Xandros, trumpeted as a newbie-friendly release.

It certainly did what it said on the box: I popped the Xandros CD into the drive, clicked a few buttons, and then left it to install. Within half an hour I had a working system — it was easier to install than Windows! I was favourably impressed by the fact that everything worked immediately: all devices recognised, Internet connection working, even file-sharing with the Windows PCs on the network was easily achieved. And it looked very nice too, with a desktop environment barely distinguishable from Windows.

After that, I installed XAMPP, a one-stop way of getting Apache, PHP and MySQL running so that I could continue to use the PC as a development server. That too went smoothly … it seemed Linux was truly “ready for the desktop” — but Xandros stayed on the spare desk and I continued to work on my trusty Windows 2000 PC.

Next instalment: the application that convinced me to push the Windows PC aside and put the Linux box on my desk!

Yes, blogs are *so* 2005! But our plan to start an email newsletter for clients was overtaken by events. Nowadays it makes much more sense to create a blog which can be syndicated via RSS, avoiding all the problems associated with inboxes overflowing with spam. And I was shamed into it by the fact that Glenn had me set up a blog for him in November, and I still hadn’t done anything about the one I’d been meaning to do myself for months.

The plan is to post stuff that will be useful to us or our clients. Currently there is no definite posting schedule — I’ll just post when I feel I have something useful to say.

A further purpose of this blog is to show what you can do with free or open-source tools. Although I could easily have installed blog software on our server and spent hours customising it, I’ve deliberately chosen to use a free service to create the blog. It took me about ten minutes to set up this blog — I hope that over the weeks you’ll see it evolve to blend with our existing website, as well as gaining new features.

It’s called The Back Burner because … well, it’s been on the back burner for a long time!