Day Six: Installing Subversion

Last night, I set up a virtual Linux machine using Oracle's VirtualBox and the latest version of Ubuntu. It runs very smoothly and looks great on my third monitor. My current setup, from left to right, is a 32 inch lcd tv for XBMC and streaming media, a 22 inch lcd for Ubuntu, another 22 inch lcd for my primary Windows display, and a final 22 inch lcd in portrait mode for web browsing. It's a great setup for both work and play. I can have my browser, multiple Windows applications, and Ubuntu open and visible all at the same time. Needless to say, I am a little spoiled in terms of screen real estate; therefore, laptops can feel a bit claustrophobic sometimes.

Last semester, I used a similar setup for my 362 Software Engineering project. The biggest downfall that I noticed is the lack of mobility. I own a decent laptop, but it has switchable graphics. Many Linux distributions either do not have the drivers that support switchable GPUs, or they make you jump through hoops to get this functionality. David, one of my group members, has been struggling with this same problem for a while now, but I believe he has got it working now. The GPU issue is just a minor inconvenience; the real problem is that I am using a very small SSD. It works great for a single OS and all of the applications that I need. Finding enough room to create another partition for Linux is easier said than done. If only I could bring myself to sacrifice Skyrim for more space. All joking aside, I may get a netbook sometime soon and install Ubuntu as my primary OS. This would solve all of my mobility issues and allow me to bring all of my materials to group meetings with relative ease.

I also installed Subversion last night and played around with some terminal commands. I used TortoiseSVN for my project last semester. The GUI is much easier for newbies to use, but it is not as clean and efficient as a simple terminal command in Ubuntu. The past two readings for this class have dealt with Subversion and worked their way from the ground up. This information really would have helped me last semester and kept me from Googling frantically. I managed to checkout the latest version of XBMC from the repository and looked briefly at the source code. Between the resources Dr. Bowring gave us and XBMC's awesome wiki, the entire process was easy and straightforward. There was a lot of right-clicking and moving through menu options with TortoiseSVN. I have a feeling that terminal window approach will be less of a hassle once I get used to it.