Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

A couple of weeks ago, my mail server started making one of those “it won’t be long now” sort of sounds.  It was the kind of noise you hear an eight year-old computer make just before everything goes dark.

I have toyed with the idea of turning everything over to Google, and this seemed as good a time as any.  I went to Google Apps

http://www.google.com/apps

and signed up.  The first thing Google did was send an email to me ensuring I could receive email at TRUSTYETC.COM.  Once I confirmed that email, I moved on to creating an MX record so that all my email would be redirected to GMail instead of the dying machine at my house.  To do this, you will need access to your domain’s DNS settings.  Because I own my own domain, I have this access.

That was all it took.  Just that quickly and easily, Google became the home for all my email.

Google can do this for any organization, no matter the size.  I selected the free, non-educational version of Google Apps.  That permits me to create 100 email accounts each with 6 GB of storage.  That’s right, they give me a total of 600 GB (0.6 TB) of space for free.  Before I shutdown my old server, I exported all the username information.  Google Apps imported those so I had no downtime for any of the email accounts.

Email works just as before with POP, IMAP and the GMail web interface.

Here’s where it gets cool.  Members of my domain (which is mostly family) can now easily share email, calendars and docs using Google’s online tools.  We can also create custom start pages and regular web pages.

http://start.trustyetc.com

is now the start page for my domain.  I can create as many of these as I need, with any domain prefix in the URL.

I have been using this service for a few weeks and I really like it.  The only missing piece is Picasa.  The online picture storage system does not tie into the Google Apps suite yet.  That has to be one of the features on the drawing board.  When Google adds Picasa and some sort of G-Drive, my family will be completely in the cloud.  That will be cool.

After nine hours of downloading from the mirror at OSU, my connection was lost.  I tried one of the torrents just to compare the download time.

Twenty minutes later, I had the ISO on my hard drive.  What a great way to distribute software.

I didn’t get to install the software until this morning.  The install is very simple.  I have a Dell laptop (Latitude D800) that I use as a sandbox machine.  It had XP on it when I started the Ubuntu install.  I told the Linux OS to use the whole hard drive and replace anything on the drive.  It got to 15% and stalled.  It couldn’t kill off the existing OS.  That’s no big deal.  I pulled out the Death and Destruction Disk (DDD).  Years ago I needed a way to format a disk in a minute or two without answering any questions.  I went through all the steps of manually formatting a disk.  Once it was blank, I made a Ghost image.  The image fits on a floppy with the Ghost software.  It takes 90 seconds to erase any hard drive and leave it boot-able to only DOS.

After I blanked the hard drive, Ubuntu had no problem doing the full install.  All my hardware was auto-detected and the login screen came right up.  On the first boot, I was told that a non-supported driver was available for my NVidia video card.  The splash screen said I could only do 3D graphics if I installed this driver.  So I installed it.

I had to reboot to enable it.

That was the end of that.  My graphics were completely hosed.  I could see half the screen and everything flickered.  There were no icons, just a solid orange rectangle.  I rebooted and did a safe-mode “get me back to what was working” thing.  Without too much pain, I got everything running again.

I am not impressed by this interface.  All the text looks rough.  I don’t know if there is an anti-aliasing setting that I am missing, but things look long in the tooth here.  If I have to look at this all day, it needs to be cleaner.

When I connected to my music server, it wouldn’t play an MP3 without an encoder download.  This is easy?  It won’t play a standard non-DRMed MP3 out of the box?

Here is the deal breaker.  I connected my Dell monitor.  It’s a standard 1024×768 flat panel.  I couldn’t get it to work at all.  I fiddled with it for an hour.  It’s basically a solid color matching the laptop background, but random ANSI characters flicker all around the screen. 

My laptop has to connect to an external display (monitor or projector).  Without that, I can’t do my job.

I let the kids play around with it the rest of the day.  They had no problem browsing the Internet and doing IM.  I suppose if I wanted to setup a lap in a school for just that, this OS would be fine.  The mere fact that most of the kids are not going to know how to install software will keep them from do too much to the machines.

Let me repeat yesterday’s question.  What does this OS do that my current OS doesn’t?  Nothing.  There is no incentive to switch.  In fact, a switch would involve a lot of pain that I don’t have right now.