One of the reasons I decided to reformat my computer was because I always end up installing many more applications then I actually need. In addition to that, I often have to install software that I downright hate for some of my computer science classes (Xilinx IDE, I’m looking at you!). Because some applications’ uninstall features don’t actually remove themselves and all their components from the computer, I end up with a bunch of registry cruft and folders on my file system that I’m not particularly happy about.

Of course, a computer can’t really do you any good unless you’re running some type of applications on it. In this post, I’d like to summarize the applications that I’m using on Microsoft Windows Vista and those that I utilize on Ubuntu. In general, I only install applications that I’m actually going to use, and those are the applications that made this list.

Vista Applications

There are two main types of applications that I run on my Vista partition. First is productivity software. These are the applications that I need in order to manage documents, write and process documentation, and generally get by in today’s connected world. The second type of software I run on Vista is utility applications. These are generally small things that I use to speed up my wok or provide some small little pieces of functionality.

Here are the applications that I run exclusively on Vista:

• Microsoft Office 2007 — Honestly, this is almost a must have for me. I don’t know what I’d do without it, to be completely honest with you. I use Microsoft Word 2007 for creating almost all my documents for school (its what everyone on my teams prefers) and the formatting options are so easy to use that its ridiculously easy to create a good looking document. Outlook 2007 is the best all in one scheduling, tasking, and email application I’ve ever utilized. I used Thunderbird for a while, but Outlook is in a whole other universe when it comes to functionality. Sometimes, I am near amazed by the functionality it provides.
• Adobe Creative Suite 3 — Without a doubt, this package of software is the industry standard when it comes to creative endeavors. I have the Web Premium edition of the software, and it is awesome in general. I am generally using either Fireworks, Photoshop, or Flash Professional, but I’ve dabbled in Illustrator from time to time. I’m just not that great at using it, yet.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 — I’m a part time C# developer, so this application is almost a necessity. C# as a programming language is awesome. It is easy to learn for someone with a background in Java, and the design time tools for Windows Forms are easy to pick up. The Visual Studio IDE is very, very powerful and easy to use. If you’re doing any type of .NET development, you should be using this IDE, and I do.
• TortoiseSVN — This is one of the utility applications that I utilize. It is a great graphical interface for subversion repository access. Without a doubt, if you’re going to use SVN on Windows, you’d be well suited to use this application.
• Notepad++ — Another utility application, Notepad++ is the best pure text editor that I’ve ever used. It has an extensible architecture that allows for an infinite number of plugins. It can be used for reading plain text files as well as various source code listings. The syntax highlighting is great, and the use of line numbers and other programmer friendly things is awesome. I highly recommend this application for HTML editing over a big IDE like Dreamweaver or something like that.

Ubuntu Applications

For my purposes, Ubuntu is meant almost solely as a development environment. I’m not going to cover the applications that are pre-installed with the operating system unless I explicitly use them and would have installed them if they weren’t present. Instead, I’m going to cover the applications that I installed using the Synaptic package manager or the apt-get terminal command.

• eclipse IDE — If you’re doing Java development, you have one of two choices when it comes to full featured Java IDEs. The first is NetBeans. It is a lightweight IDE that includes, out of the box, a visual editor for user interfaces. That’s a nice feature to have. My choice of IDE, however, is the eclipse open source IDE. Eclipse is more like an IDE framework then anything else. It originally was meant for Java, but can be used with PHP, Javascript, C, C++, Scheme, and many other languages now. In addition, eclipse has more plugins developed for it than anything I’ve ever seen. It might even have more than WordPress, another really extensible system. My favorite features are the source formatter and class browser. I strongly recommend the use of the eclipse IDE for all Java developers.
• Pidgin — You can’t keep in touch with anyone anymore unless you’re using some type of instant messaging client. In my experience, Pidgin is a lightweight and responsive IM client. It is another extensible application with numerous plugins providing an enormous amount of extra functionality.

Common Applications

I’ve obviously left off numerous other applications that I use. One example is Firefox, my web browser of choice. I use it on both platforms, Vista and Ubuntu, and love it for its plugins and responsiveness. I also have the JRE installed and other things like that.

In the next part of this series, I’ll be posting my impressions of my dual booting experience and the positives and negatives of the process as I see it. If you know of any other excellent applications that I’m missing, be sure to let me know.

Reformatting your hard drive on your laptop can be done if you know what you’re doing, but if not, you could put your computer in need of some serious laptop repair. Whether your laptop LCD screen isn’t working anymore or the reformatting caused the laptop fan to work overtime, get it fixed before something serious happens.

Last week, I started along a path not easily turned away from. I decided it was time to go the route of the dual-boot. I reformatted my hard drives on my laptop and my desktop and set out to install Vista and Ubuntu. Here’s what I did:

Step 1: Backups

The first thing I did, as I’m sure is no surprise to anyone, is backup all my personal and other files on my Windows box. For me, this meant pulling down the tutorials that I had accumulated over the years, saving my various resumes and cover letters, and making sure I saved the pictures that I have on my computer. Since I was going to be reformatting, this backup was an absolute necessity.

After making the appropriate backups, I uninstalled Microsoft Office 2007 and Adobe Creative Suite 3 from my computer. I uninstalled these before formatting my hard drive because they require registration with a product key, and I needed to deactivate the product to make sure I wouldn’t have trouble when installing it again. After doing this, I made a list of the applications I had installed and would want to reinstall after the format I was going to do. Where possible, I downloaded the install utility for the program and stored it on my backup drive so I wouldn’t have to download it once I had reformatted. I did this for Mozilla Firefox, Notepad++, the Windows JDK, and the Windows Live OneCare installer.

Finally, I saved several preferences files to my backup drive including my eclipse preferences and my Firefox preferences and installed extensions. To accomplish the second part here, I used the fabulous Firefox Extension Backup Extension. At this point, each thing that I needed backed up was on my portable flash drive (I only used about a gig of backup space). I downloaded and burnt the ISO for Ubuntu 7.10, and I was ready to go ahead and get started with my OS installation.

Step 2: Partitioning and Windows

To start installing my new operating systems, I had to first decide which to install first. Since I’m definitely more familiar with Windows, I decided to go with Vista first. Anyone who has ever installed windows before knows how to get everything setup here, but I’ll reiterate here for anyone unfamiliar with the process.

First, you’ll want to insert your Vista system DVD into your disk drive and restart the computer. If you’ve set your computer to check your CD/DVD drive during bootup, you should be fine. If it is not set as such, you’ll have to mess with your BIOS settings by pressing F2, F10, or F12 during the start up procedure. There, you’d enabled multiple bootup devices and define your optical drive as the device to examine first. You can find more detailed information here.

Once you’ve booted into the Windows install screen, you’ll have to enter your product key. Do this, and you should be brought to the Windows partitioning tool. Here, you should go ahead and repartition your hard drive to account for your new VIsta and linux installation. The process is pretty intuitive, but the hard part is figuring out how exactly the hard drive should be partitioned.

You’re going to want to create at least 3 partitions, and the way you probably want to do this is to consider the following things:

• How big do I want my Linux partition to be? — I would recommend, at the least, 10 GB of space for your main Linux partition. If it is going to be your primary operating system, you’ll probably want to allocate more space.
• How big do I want my Linux swap space to be? — Depending on your hard drive size, you can probably make this as big as you want. I seem to be getting pretty good performance using 1 GB for the swap on my laptop and 2 GB on my desktop, but your experience may vary.

A good reference (that I found after the fact) is the following: Partitioning Reference. It recommends double your RAM for your swap, which I definitely didn’t do. If I could go back and do it again (hassle-free), I would.

After partitioning, select the partition that you set aside for your Windows install, and go ahead and install it. The Windows Vista installer provides step by step instructions for you, so I’m not going to go any farther with that here. All I can say is that you should set up your administrative user, and that is all. Don’t worry about installing anything in Vista until you have installed Ubuntu. That way, if you end up having to start over (corrupted file, something goes FUBAR) then you won’t have wasted a bunch of time configuring things. After following these steps, I was ready to go ahead and get started with Ubuntu.

Step 3: Ubuntu

After making sure Windows installed properly (it boots up, you can log in, etc.), I was ready to start the Ubuntu installation. I inserted my Ubuntu disk that I burned into my optical drive and restarted my computer. Since I was still set up to boot from my optical drive first, I was presented with an attractive boot screen, where I selected the first option to install or use Ubuntu. This is the default, so if you’re following along it should be pretty easy to do. Ubuntu will boot from the CD or DVD that your burnt it to into the actual operating system. This was a nice surprise for sure.

Once Ubuntu had booted up, there was an icon on the desktop titled Install. All I had to do was double click the icon and the install process started. It was straightforward and pretty fast, with explanations every step of the way. It was almost as good as the Windows installer. The only part where you might get confused is the partitioning selection options. When presented with partitioning options, I chose manual, and then assigned the swap and main linux partitions to those that I had created earlier. I honestly don’t know anything about the different formatting options that were available, so I just picked the first one in the list, ext3.

Like I said, the install went quickly, and it automatically installed a boot loader, GRUB, that lets you pick from your installed Operating Systems. So, I booted into Ubuntu to ensure that it worked and I was able to login. On my laptop, Ubuntu recognized all my hardware immediately and had drivers for almost everything. The only exception was my graphics card, which had drivers, they just weren’t able to run the whiz-bang compiz 3d desktop effects that I wanted, so I followed a tutorial to download and compile the official ATI drivers.

Step 4: Wrapping Up

At this point, I had a fully functional dual boot system. I could boot into either operating system, both were functional, and everything was working just dandily. The next step was installing all the programs and packages that I was going to be using, but I’ll save that for the next post in this series. There’s a few things that I did right away, though, that you might want to emulate.

First, I wanted to rename the Vista option in GRUB to strip out the Longhorn reference and make it the default on my desktop. To do so, I opened a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and typed sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst. The file was well-commented, so I was quickly able to figure out what I needed to do. I saved the file, restarted the system, and it was clear my changes had worked.

After this painless install process, I was really stoked about using Ubuntu. Is it possible that everything is this easy and fast? I certainly hoped so. In the next part of this series, I’ll cover the programs and packages that I installed in each operating system, the reasons why, and continue to give some details of my experience.