Monday, February 27, 2012

I've been running LinuxMint12 on my work laptop (Dell Precision M4400)  a couple months ago. I found the stock interface weird, so I switched to MATE. I'm liking it, it's a little windows 7-ish, but at least I can easily make short-cuts on my desktop unlike the other way. I do have some bugs I have run into:

1) clicking lock desktop on a 2 monitor setup, moves the bottom nav to the left instead of locking - if I click it a second time it will lock
2) right click 'edit menu' on the main menu on bottom nav does nothing. I think that's important to add icons to the menus.
3) If I boot up with the hardware switch on my wireless disabled, flipping the switch does not work. I have to boot up with it enabled.

Other than that it works pretty well. I've been die-hard Ubuntu fan, but I just really hate Unity.

I did install Xubuntu a couple weeks ago on the wife's netbook - I was so tired of the windows trojans/virus issues I had to do something about it. I think I'll give it a try on my next work notebook OS install.

What is everyone else's Laptop Unix OS favorite flavor, and why?
I've been asked to speak at GR8Conf this summer in Minneapolis, MN, July 29-31. I will be giving 3 talks:

1) Grails in the Enterprise  - How to give your company a transition into Grails using the Struts plugin without rewriting everything. Giving a non-expensive path forward will really help you sell Grails to your organization when they know they won't need to re-write their entire application to start reaping the benefits.

2) Streaming Video with Grails - Pseudostreaming really, but there is some neat stuff to be done here with Grails that are no cost, cheap options to give you the ability to play video with the big boys.

3) Clustering Quartz (With Terracotta Open source edition) - I'll cover clustering in the old traditional sense with a simple database cluster, and go into using the free, open source edition of Terracotta to take it  to another level.

I'm very excited for this honor and will do my best to give Grails developers the info they need to help make their lives easier (And more scalable!).

Look for more posts in the future, mostly with nice Grails and Groovy nuggets of wisdom I come across. There are many gotchas and quirks to work around I have run into, it's only fair to warn others of issues you may have to work around.