Some notes of my experience of moving to Linux in VirtualBox as a way of using the OS of my choice at work. (Where by "my choice" I mean "anything but Windows").
If we hadn't have just started rolling out Exchange 2010 there is no way I could have switched. Exchange 2010 finally brings a decent web client and you miss out on very little that only Outlook on the desktop can do (Using vote buttons in emails and proposing new meeting times are the only two I can think of). However, the really annoying thing is, that for no reason whatsoever, it doesn't support Chrome on Linux. You have to resort to spoofing your user-agent, but in Chrome this seems to affect all instances of the browser - you can't do it on a per tab/window basis.
So on Fedora, I copied the default Chrome desktop shortcut from /usr/local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/, but gave it a different name. Then within that file added in the --user-agent parameter as mentioned in the link above. This way I get two different Chromes showing up in the list of applications so I can pick the right one depending on whether I'm at work or home.
I have an inkling, though, that spoofing as OSX (well, it wasn't going to be Windows was it?) mucks up the ability to join WebEx meetings via Chrome; Firefox works fine.
I tried Ubuntu first as that was the obvious choice, especially for compatibility and available applications, etc. However, I had a lot of trouble with Unity and kept losing the interface. Even trying those tricks I still got the odd graphical glitch in Unity; mostly the Finder, sorry Nautilus, appearing with the "Win 95" look. Restarting this would do the trick.
For what it is worth (not a lot) I actully like the Unity interface. And a left hand dock is the most sensible position anyway.
apt-get update: “E: Could not get lock /var/lib/apt/lists/lock – open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)”I had an issue not being able to execute Sesame (from Lastpass) on a USB drive. To be fair, Fedora has the same problem, so by that point I just disabled Sesame for my Linux installs.
Since Unity was not sticking for me I thought I'd have a look at Gnome 3. I prefer the overall look of Gnome 3; although I think I prefer the global menus of Unity (since I've used Macs for a long time) - I say think, because it's not bothering me as much as it used to. I think I read somewhere that OSX (and 9 before it) is * centric so it works, there, where as Linux is traditionally ? centric so individual menus make more sense. ke unity does (way better in my opinion)
I noted this down at the time, but now when I go back and try the normal http_proxy and https_proxy variables do the trick, and there is no need for a variable called "proxy".
I forgot I had this issue initially, but the Stable channel recently updating to 14 and producing an SELinux error reminded me.
Actually the issue I first had was launching Chrome would cause a critical error in VirtualBox, but then after a few updates somewhere along the line I tried it again and it was ok; apart from Lastpass would cause Chrome to crash (Comment 35 fixed it for me: restorecon -R ~/.config).
As to fixing the new error, it looks like a fix is in progress. However, I had SELinux Troubleshooter configured to alert me and it gives you instructions on how to get Chrome working again. So I just followed them and all seems well.
Installing Flash, although I found it a bit confusing at first being a newb as the yum install from Adobe is just adding the repos, not Flash itself, so do need to do yum install flash-plugin afterwards, but none of the other gubins mentioned.
I found this harder than getting it working on Windows. Was suprised there's no package so no yum install nodejs, has to be done from source.
Had lots of fun and games getting Ruby installed via rvm. In hindsight, probably my problem not reading the instructions properly (not having all the development tools installed):
atk-devel.However, with Ruby 1.8.7 there is a RVM/Fedora specific issue, and Ruby needs patching.
Harder than I thought it would be on Linux. Makes me appreciate how much hard work the RubyInstaller folk have put in to make Windows installation so seamless.
The Ubuntu installation instructions refer to libgtk-dev, the equivalent on Fedora is gtk2-devel
Gwibber doesn't work behind a proxy
OpenJDK is a no-go with WebEx, have to use the Sun Java.
Need to install XFS Font Server (My notes on my Pinboard bookmark page for IBM's instructions for installing in an older version of Fedora). Also this.
If you hold down the alt key before scrolling it will switch from vertical to horizontal scrolling. However, by some magical combination of the ALT key and scrolling (that I can't repeat) I accidentally switched this permanently and so it appeared that scrolling (vertically) had suddenly broken and stopped working. If this happens, pressing the ALT key (or SHIFT and ALT whilst or before scrolling) should get things back to normal.
I made the switch from Fedora to Arch Linux. So most of the above is very out of date. Most of my actual Arch Notes seem to have ended up on Pinboard.