Brandon Sharitt's Blog

A couple of weeks ago, I officially decided to get out of the Air Force. So that means I’m looking for a job. Right now I’m looking in Kentucky(but not closer than 100 miles from Cincinnati), Tennessee, and the Carolinas, with most of my energy focused on the Carolinas. I’m really hoping to find something in the Raleigh or Research Triangle Area of NC since it seems to be such a great place to live and work, though I’m not limiting myself at this point. One up side of being an IT guy is that I can pretty much work anywhere with computers, which is just about everywhere these days.  I’d appreciate any advice, leads, or any help at all. My resume is here.

So far the biggest problem I’m finding is that while I feel I’m qualified for a great many jobs, I’m having trouble “proving it”, mostly when it comes to Linux admin jobs. I use Linux at home all the time, there aren’t even any Windows machines in my house, and have years of experience using it, but unfortunately my professional work in the Air Force has been almost all Windows. While I will work as a Windows admin(servers, I don’t really want to do PC support anymore), I would really like a shot at Linux. Just for my own purposes of brushing up on things in case I do get a Linux job, I’ll be setting up a new backup server this weekend, and I’m probably going with CentOS for no other reason that it being mostly Red Hat.

I’ve also pretty much decided to stop working on what will probably be a mostly worthless online degree. Instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to flex my long dormant programming muscles. I’ve got a few projects planned over the next few months. One that I’m most excited about kind of goes back to my beginnings. My first programing project was a picture view written in Visual Basic. While it wasn’t much to look at, I was still proud of it. This new project will go just above picture viewer into some organizing territory, and this time it will be written in Python/GTK+ and targeted at Linux. While I’m writing it as more of a programming exercise and am not aiming for anything close to iPhoto or Picasa right away, I do hope I stick with it as a long term project.

That will cover some Python and desktop programming warm ups, but another area that I’m not as rusty in, but still need some refreshing is web development. What I want to do with this is just a little recipe database for use inside my home network. With it I’ll be brushing up on my PHP, HTML, JavaScript(maybe some AJAXy stuff), and especially MySQL(I really need to work on my database programming). If I get right to it and don’t get too distracted, this could easily be a weekend project, but I don’t see myself getting that much free time.

Finally, I plan to branch out into something new, mobile development. This one is the most distant, and most subject to being forgotten about. I don’t even know exactly what type of program I want to write yet, but I do want to do a little bit of Android programming. I also need the Java practice since it’s one of those things I’ve learned in school, but never actually put into practice outside of the assignments in class. Overall I think they are some solid projects and small enough in scale to make them quite attainable, assuming I can just find the spare time.

For a while now, there have really been no Windows machines in my home(exception being a couple of months when my wife got a new laptop and I wasn’t there to install Ubuntu), and have been running Linux(namely Ubuntu) on everything. With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.04, I thought now would be a good time to go over what I’m using Linux for at home and any obstacle there maybe and any things that have improved by using Linux.

Background

There are two people using the PCs in my home, my wife and me. My wife is you typical PC user, not a geek, just used Windows all her life to do basic things like web browsing and email. I, on the other hand, am a bit of a geek and haven’t been a full time Windows user in quite some time. I’ve actually used Linux on and off for over 10 years, and before making this most recent switch to Linux, I had been a Mac user. I work in IT and spend everyday cleaning up Microsoft’s mess at work, so I’d rather not do it at home. I’m actually not going to talk about the file server since I’d never run one using Windows or any other non-Unix-like OS.

Current Uses

The are 5 machines currently running Linux in my home, two netbooks, my desktop, a file server and an old laptop re-purposed as a HTPC. My wife and I each have a netbook and our uses are what you’d probably expect on such a device, web browsing, IM, email and writing blog posts like this one. I use my desktop for much of the same with a few extra things that need the power like software development and the occasional image or video editing.

Hurdles

Now matter how good the new platform, moving from one OS to another is always going to present so hurdles. For my wife, the issue wasn’t so much an issue of losing any thing, my simply adjusting to minor differences. She spends most of her time either in a web browser or organizing photos. Luckily, when she was still on Windows, she was already using Firefox and Picasa, so she there was no change there. The only real application change was going from the Yahoo’s IM client to Pidgin, but IM clients are so simple, most users can’t even tell the difference. As for for me, I’m generally able to work in a platform agnostic manner, so switching from Safari on the Mac(Firefox is really crap on that OS) to Firefox wasn’t a big deal, the same with going from Apple Mail to Evolution for mail.

One of my early problems was syncing my AppleTV that I had at the time with content and only a Linux box. While iTunes would work in Wine, it wouldn’t sync to the AppleTV(at least not at the time), so I was stuck running Windows in a virtual machine to run iTunes. The problem was eventually solved by getting rid of the AppleTV(I actually got rid of the Mac to escape Apple’s closed ecosystem) and replacing it with my Linux powered HTPC. So far, the Ubuntu laptop hooked up to the TV running the Elisa media center software has been able to do everything I needed from the AppleTV without a proprietary piece of software available from only one vendor.

Another hurdle that some face is games, but coming from a Mac, that wasn’t actually a big one for me. There are a few older games that I like to keep around, but this play fine on Wine. For any gaming I just go with my Wii anyway.

Benefits

Obviously, if there were no benefits, I wouldn’t have bother switching to Linux. For my wife’s Windows machine, the most obvious benefit was no more worrying about viruses and other malware. Since my wife spends a lot of time on MySpace and gets a lot of forwarded e-mails from people, which means even with anti-virus and and anti-spyware software, her laptop needed lot of attention and a format and reinstall seemed to be almost routine every few months.

For me, the reasons to switch were a bit different. Of course I had stayed away from Windows for so long for the same reason I needed to migrate my wife away, but the Mac had addressed those issues. With its Unix heritage, the Mac OS has many similarities to Linux, so why change? The biggest reason was freedom of choice of hardware. Apple only offers a relatively small selection of overprice hardware, meaning I could only choose from what hardware Steve Jobs has blessed, meaning no netbook for me. There’s also my favorite thing about Ubuntu, easy access to tons of software in the repositories. I no longer worry about trying to find the right software to complete all my tasks, instead I end up trying find tasks so I can use this vast array of software.

Finally for the HTPC, there’s not a lot to talk about at first since the operation is about the same for my uses, though the iTunes store is obviously missing if you’re so inclined. There is one big benefit to not using the AppleTV, being that you are not required to be locked into Apple’s iTunes ecosystem.

Conclusion

I’m sure many of you are aware of Microsoft’s security problems and Apple’s lock in problems. But what I really want you to take away from this is that Linux(particularly Ubuntu) is ready for prime time. I highly encourage you to give it a so, just head over ubuntu.com and download the live cd so you can try it out with out installing anything. If you want to go a step further, but not completely get rid of Windows, Ubuntu also offers an option(called Wubi) to install itself alongside Windows so you can try it out further.