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Opinion:

In my quest for learning, I did my first step with Linux back into 2006 with the 6.06 LTS version.  Since that time, I have learned quite a lot, but still consider myself a newbee.

From that perspective, Ubuntu has come long way.  Every 6 months, since Ubuntu 6.10, I have tested each release. In general it was always a step forward for user friendlyness.  Ubuntu 8.10 is no exception…  and in my opinion it is the best Ubutu release ever.  Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is somewhat what I was expecting from 8.04.

The new artwork makes it feel different than previous release.  While exploring the menus and configurations you will notice that it is not just a feeling.  In the past, to configure a wireless network, you had to go to System / Administration / Networking.  Then setting your WEP key (if using WEP) and activate the adapter.  Often I had to perform “activate+deactivate” a couple of time to finally get a working connection.

Now the network manager can be found under System / Preferences / Network configuration, but I didn’t have to go there since a tooltip appeared at first logon stating “wireless networks available”.  I just had to select the right SSID and configure the WEP key from there.  On top of that, the connection was established within seconds after first try…

Peoples definition of “home computer” has changed quite a bit.  Previously, home computer was synonym of desktop PC, now if notebooks sales have not exceeded desktop sales, I guess it is just a matter of time…  I think, with this release, Ubuntu followed this wave of mobility.

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If some of you have been using PHP on Windows with SQL Server 2005, you may have hit some problems especially if you wanted to exploit new features of SQL Server 2005 like xml datatype, NVARCHAR(MAX), etc.

The driver that had the better support for these were the PHP ODBC wrapper combined with the SQL Server 2000 ODBC driver.  The bad news is, by default, PHP ODBC uses server-side dynamic cursors which is the thing Microsoft says to avoid as much as possible (unless you have a need for that).  It is very slow, server resource intensive, poor performing, etc.

Some succeeded to change the way ODBC were handling resultset by using a hint at connection time (SQL_CUR_USE_ODBC), but it didn’t help for us.  Some perfectly valid parameterized queries where just giving unexpected results.

I even downloaded PHP’s source code to see why it was using dynamic cursors by default.  If I could, at least, change the default cursor, we may had a little performance increase…  It was hardcoded to “dynamic” with the following comment on top of it:

Try to set CURSOR_TYPE to dynamic. Driver will replace this with other type if not possible.

So next thing would be to change it and recompile…  forgot about it!

Then, some time at the end of 2007, I discovered an alpha community preview release of a new driver made by Microsoft.  Wohoo!  This version was unstable with xml datatypes at a point that it was making my Apache server crash… 

Fortunately, the official release finally got out et we are testing it for some time now!  So far, there are no blocking bugs.  The quality is good enough that I took the time to created a Creole wrapper (our web application uses Creole as database wrapper API) for it and start using it full-time on our develpment environment.

Here are some observations:

• On my laptop, based on a non-official, non-extensive performance test, I had a 400% to 500% performance boost for fetching 200 records of a large (numerous fields) table.
• UTF-8 support exists, but conversion must be done manually, field by field (better have a database wrapper API…) and at a huge performance cost.
• UTF-8 support works only for query parameters and resultset values.  If you hardcoded a query filter (I know it is not a best practice, but we all supports legacy applications…) you will have to rewrite it with parameters or drop UTF-8 support.
• If you are using PHP from a Linux server, you are still left alone because the Microsoft driver relies on the ODBC SQL Server Native Client driver that works only on Windows.

If you need more information about the driver, you can visit the Microsoft blog and forum.

*** UPDATE : 2009-02-04 ***

Thanks to Piotr initiative, a new creole driver is now available (under LGPL license) here:
http://code.google.com/p/mssqlsrv/

*** UPDATE 2008/11/28 ***

See a more complete review of Ubuntu 8.10 on this Lenovo R61 here

***************

General Hardware Specifications of Lenovo R61

Special Keyboard Keys

Installation Steps

The installation steps are the same that I used when I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my Inspiron 8600

see additional configuration and conclusion on following page >>

General Hardware Specifications of Inspiron 8600

Special Keyboard Keys

A little bit of history:
Grandma is using an old Dell Optiplex GX100 with a 600Mhz Celeron and RAM upgraded to 384MB. It used to run Windows 98. I then upgraded to Windows XP Home edition. The computer is used for web surfing, e-mails and playing small games (ex: puzzle, cards, etc.).

Being exposed to Linux a couple of time, she began to like the little free games found on many distributions. That gave me the idea to dual-boot Linux on her machine to slowly move away from Windows.

Why move away from Windows?

• Grandma won’t pay the additional $$$ for Vista upgrade, and I won’t go with pirated version…
• One day or they other, XP won’t be supported and will be more vulnerable to attacks (we all know MS won’t try to make XP as robust as Vista…) and maybe Linux will become more Grandma’s friendly.
• Grandma really understands what I’ve told her in the past: “don’t be afraid of the computer. Worst case scenario is we’ll need to reinstall.”. So she often get crap on her computer. Linux is less targeted by these crap softwares.
• Linux is free and has the capability to full-fill 98% of Grandma’s needs. The 2% is playing incompatible games like “The Sims” or navigating on Firefox __not-friendy__ sites

The Plan:
(it has to be as smooth as possible for a chance of success)

• Upgrade HD capacity (original 10GB is too small for 2 OS and data-files…)
• Install an easy to support distribution (being a Linux newbie, I don’t want to increase my support time…)
• Migrate e-mails from Outlook Express to Thunderbird. Then share the Thunderbird data files on both operating systems (if possible).
• Have an easy to learn and use MSN Messenger replacement for Linux.
• Have proprietary format (MP3, WMV, MOV, etc.)
• Have other proprietary support for better web experience (Java, Flash, etc.)

Installation:

• Windows XP as usual…
• Take a ghost image… so if something goes wrong, I won’t have to take an eternity to reinstall this OS.
• Install the chosen linux distribution
  • I tried Linux Mint. What a great distribution for beginners… Even non-free stuff is installed and the distribution also supports Ubuntu repositories! After installation, it was slow like crazy. So I had to look for something else.
  • I thought about Ubuntu but I wasn’t sure because Linux Mint is derived from it. So I expected the same performance issue… for this reason I went with the lightweight Xubuntu 6.06.
  • This one was working well, no performance problems but no games either. You know those little games I was talking about earlier… I managed to install GNOME-Games manually but no menu appears to lunch them. That’s it! it fails the “newbie support” time requirement.
  • After some research I discovered that Ubuntu performance problems with Optiplex GX100 starts with version 6.10. So I gave a try to 6.06 LTS.
  • This time, performance is correct.
• Installation of Thunderbird on both OS.
  • I installed the OS this way:
    • Partition 1: NTFS: Windows XP
    • Partition 2: Linux SWAP
    • Partition 3: ext3: Linux OS
    • Partition 4: FAT32: Shared partition for data files
  • Install Thunderbird on Windows XP first. After installation, Thunderbird asks for importing e-mails and settings from Outlook Express
  • After content is imported, move account folder on the shared partition.
    • Backup the current data folders
    • Setup the new data folder location
    • Close Thunderbird
    • Overwrite the new folder location with files from the backup
    • Restart Thunderbird
  • Install Thunderbird on Linux. After installation, change Thunderbird account folder to the location on the shared partition and restart.
  • So far it is working well. Whatever OS we boot from, we have access to all the downloaded e-mails.
• Install aMSN as the MSN Messenger client.
  (for an MSN Messenger user, it’s one of the easiest Linux compatible client to go with — I also like Kopete)
• Install proprietary stuff using Automatix2 (Video codecs, Java, Flash, etc.)

Dell Optiplex GX100 Hardware Specifications:

**** General Hardware Specifications of Inspiron 8600 ****

**** Special Keyboard Keys ****

Volume Up / Down	Ok
Mute	Ok
Media Play/Pause toggle	I don’t know
Media Stop	I don’t know
Media Skip Next	I don’t know
Media Skip Previous	I don’t know
Power button	I don’t know
Fn + Volume Up / Down	Ok
Fn + Mute	Ok
Fn + Brigthness Up / Down	Ok
Fn + Numeric keypad	Ok	Behave correctly depending if NumLock is On or Off
Fn + CRT/LCD	I don’t know
Fn + Suspend	I don’t know
Fn + Scroll Lock	I don’t know
Fn + SysRq	I don’t know
Fn + Wireless (on/off)	Ok	But there is no visual indication that wireless on/off has been toggled. ifconfig still show an ip address when wireless is off (maybe by design… I’m too used to ipconfig from Windows ). You need to use iwconfig to see if the radio is on/off.

**** Installation Steps ****

• Plug the laptop into the power outlet.
  Yes I experienced issues in the past when installing OS (Windows and Linux) while running on battery power. So now I don’t take the chance, its too long to have to reinstall…
• Boot with CD
• Choose ‘Start or install Ubuntu’ on boot menu
• When GNOME appears, start the installation by clicking the ‘Install’ icon
• Choose the installer’s language: English, [Forward]
• Choose the time zone: Montreal, [Forward]
• Choose the keyboard layout: Canada / Canada for standard canadian french layout, [Forward]
• Partition the hard drive: manual because I have a special dual-boot with Windows XP, [Forward]
• Migrate Documents and Settings for an existing operating system: none, [Forward]
• Enter name, login, password and computer name, [Forward]
• INSTALL! (a 20 minutes step)
• Restart the computer, don’t forget to remove the CD when asked to
• Boot Ubuntu 7.04 for the first time

**** Configuration Steps ****

**** Additional Software Installation ****

**** Additional Notes ****

General Hardware Specifications of Inspiron 8600:

Special Keyboard Keys:

Volume Up / Down	Ok
Mute	Ok
Media Play/Pause toggle	Partially	Play works, Pause does’nt (restart the song instead of pausing)
Media Stop	Ok
Media Skip Next	Ok
Media Skip Previous	Ok
Power button	Ok	Turn off the computer without confirmation… It can be very frustrating when your kid pushes it just before you save your work.
Fn + Volume Up / Down	Ok
Fn + Mute	Ok
Fn + Brigthness Up / Down	Ok
Fn + Numeric keypad	Ok	Behave correctly depending if NumLock is On or Off
Fn + CRT/LCD	I don’t know
Fn + Suspend	I don’t know
Fn + Scroll Lock	I don’t know
Fn + SysRq	I don’t know
Fn + Wireless (on/off)	Ok	But there is no visual indication that wireless on/off has been toggled. ifconfig still show an ip address when wireless is off (maybe by design… I’m too used to ipconfig from Windows ). You need to use iwconfig to see if the radio is on/off.

Additional Software Installation I performed: