Revive an old laptop with new *free* software

Allow me to back up a bit here. I was going to write about Open Source Software (OSS) and explain how you use it already in so many different ways and just don't realize it. But instead, I thought I should practice what I preach. Admittedly, my motives weren't completely altruistic. I have an old laptop that needed revival. So I started at what I consider the beginning of the OSS craze, the operating system.

I decided that I’d put a Unix/Linux based operating system on the thing. Now many of you probably think I am quite technical, and I must protest. My focus has always been on the user side of the computer. So my quest was to find the easiest and quickest way to do this.

My quest took me to a number of websites, and I found a poll that indicated that Ubuntu was the most popular distribution out there. I was amazed at how many are available. I won’t bore you with the details here, but if you are interested in more info, a quick read of the Wikipedia article will explain quite a bit and provide links. At the end of this blog entry, I will supply the one link will allow you follow my path.

So – how did it go? Pretty good so far. I did the download to another PC and burned a CD to make a boot disk. It took me two tries since the software I used didn’t make a bootable CD for me. Instead I used the utility recommended at the download site and had what I needed. It was probably a user error on my attempt using the Roxio CD creator software on my PC.

Here’s where the cool part starts. When you load the CD into the drive, the Autoplay feature kicks in and give you a menu with three choices. One of the choices is to ‘try’ the Ubuntu without rebooting. Wow – how nice is that? It will run and allow you to figure out if it can handle all the devices on your PC. I only had one that I was worried about and that was an old Cisco wireless card. I had trouble with that on a corporate supported PC years ago, so I could only imagine that I would have trouble again.

So I allowed the process to start. Now keep in mind the laptop I was using is old and without much memory, 512mb I think. The load of the O/S took some time, but eventually loaded and there it was. Complete with internet access. Everything working including the wireless card! I played around a bit and decided to bite the bullet and load the whole thing.

I discovered a menu option and it gave me a choice and I took it. Now the coolness continues, I could refresh the entire PC with a clean Ubuntu install, or I could create a dual boot situation. Meaning the PC could allow you to choose Ubunto or Windows that was already loaded. Maybe on the next machine, I will try the ‘dual-boot’ OS option, but for now, I went for the gusto.

I would liken the experience to moving from an older Windows version to something several generations newer, like from Win98 to Vista. People tend to complain about Vista, but for the most part it’s the little differences that annoy the majority. It’s the hardware requirements that frustrate the rest of us.

Summary – sell your Micro$oft stock soon. I can tell that I won’t be buying any more Micro$oft operating systems in the future. There’s quite of bit of ground left to cover, but I think it’s safe to say that the gap is closing rapidly.

I still have some things to work out as it relates to getting files to and from other PCs on my home network. That’s not quite working the way I expected, but my goal has been reached. I have a built a PC that can access the internet and it comes with all the office software already loaded. You read that correctly, OpenOffice is a part of the Ubuntu boot disk. Imagine how big a CD you would need. I don’t think Micro$oft could fit Vista and Office on a DVD, much less on a bootable CD. Okay, so it’s not the latest version, but the upgrades should be easy.

If there’s a software program that use on your PC today, I will venture a guess that there’s a reasonable replacement out there. And while it may not be exactly what you are used to, I would imagine that you can’t really justify the cost difference.

In closing, this isn’t for everybody. If you depend on your PC for your livelihood, it’s not time to make that jump. If you want to have another PC in your house that’s legally using current software, I highly recommend Ubuntu.

Next time – Cloud computing and what it means to you and me. You are probably using it and don’t even realize that you are quite that hip.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Ok, I can’t resist one more link to an article on Popular Mechanics site written by co-host Jamie Hyneman of one of my favorite TV shows, “Mythbusters”:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/upgrade/4243994.html?page=3

Technical details: I got the latest release, 8.10 known as Intrepid Ibex. See that wasn't that bad now was it?

Full Disclosure: My friend and associate, Joe had already done this to a PC, but I assumed that since he is way more technical than me, that it was much more challenging that it turned out to be.

Random Thoughts on Pentaho Data Integration

Hello,

My name is David Read and I have been working with Pentaho now for about six months. I have only been using the Data Integration tool, formerly known as Kettle. So far, I have been very impressed with the tool and done some very cool things with it.

It won't take much to figure out who I work for, one quick search on LinkedIn and you will have found me. But it doesn't matter what type of business I am in, I see applications for the tool in nearly every business that deals with datafiles any significant size, say greater than 50k lines.

I will publish some tips and tricks that I have discovered that I don't think are readily available via the many different wikis and such that are used by the PDI community.

Several of the items I plan to include are:

1) using mail to only mail the documents you want from within a job that FTPs rather large files and you only want the output attached to the mail message.

2) doing more manipulation with text files than should be done without using a database.

3) inserting data onto different sheets of an Excel workbook

I have been using the latest 3.1.0 GA release and it is quite nice. If you haven't tried it, you really should. It's quite easy to get started with a single download. Visit http://www.pentaho.com/products/data_integration/ to read more and get the latest version to download.

If you are like me and used to spend hours trying to write programs to manipulate simple text files that were bigger than Excel could or should handle, then Pentaho's tool might just be the thing you might need.

Currently labeled as a world-class ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) tool, people that need to do simple file maninpulation tasks may not realize that such a tool is available. The possibilities are endless and the initial costs are, well, nothing. There are some good blogs out there that have tried to explain how to get going with PDI, but many of them seem to be aimed at more technical folks that have experience with mainstream products or are more Java savvy. I will attempt to write for a slightly less technical audience, including accountants and business analysts that may benefit from something a bit more capable than Excel and VBA.

Stay tuned...