As some of you may recall, after a recent hard drive crash I invested in a new laptop and then installed Ubuntu on the old laptop. This was a great idea as I found that all of the previous issues I had encountered whilst using Linux seem to have been addressed with Ubuntu (I have previously used Fedora). The only problem I found was that I was neglecting the new laptop and using the old machine with Ubuntu on it a little tto much.

With renewed enthusiasm in Lunux I would love to make the jump from Windows but try as hard as I can - I cant seem to take the plunge and replace Vista on the new laptop with Linux. This is mostly due to not being to find a decent replacement for Ultraedit - I've tried the alternatives - none of which really cut the mustard, I've even installed Ultraedit running under WINE but nothing quite matches up to my expectations (Ultraedit is just too sluggish running under wine to be really useable for me)

Well....

Although I haven't one the whole hog - I HAVE taken the plunge and set up the new laptop as dual boot Linux / Vista.

This is actually very easy to do with Ubuntu Gutsy - basically you'll need to have Vista already installed and then boot up with the Ubuntu CD. Once booted, click on the 'Install' icon on the desktop and the installation process will start - it will ask you a few questions and then launch into the partitioning tool. The partitioning tool will present you with 3 options - assisted partition / use whole disk / manual partition. Choose the first option (assisted partition). The tool will then ask you what size you want to adjust the partition to - choose a suitable size and then the installer will do the rest.

When the installation is finished it will ask you to remove the disk from the drive and hit enter - the machine will then reboot and start with a boot menu allowing you to select what os you want - the bottom option will be windows.

Anyhows.....

With Ubuntu installed on my machine I have opted to install VMware under Linux so that I can run Windows as a Virtual Machine - this will allow me to run Ultraedit and the other applications that I need that I can't find Linux alternatives for (mostly work related applications such as robot programming clients). Setting it up in this way I can use Ubuntu as my primary ooperating system :)

I have also taken the plunge and done the same for my company laptop - evolution works flawlessly as an exchange client and I seem to have less network problems with Ubuntu than I did with Windows. (plus I can't wait to see the look on the IT managers face - lol).

The coming weeks will be a real test to see if I can live without windows - it shouldn't be a problem with the company laptop as I don't do any programming with that machine - just manager stuff involving the office suite (open office that is ;) ) and project based stuff for which I already use open workbench.

If I can happily live without booting into Vista on the other machine I will remove it :D

One annoyance has come out of this - my new laptop came with a recovery disk - the disk is an Asus branded disk that will only allow installation onto an Asus machine - This however means that it won't allow me to install Vista into VMware as it does not see the virtual machine as an Asus machine - phah!!! - looks like I will have to revert back to XP for the time being.

DMCMS Latest

With renewed vigour I have been ploughing into getting the next release of DMCMS ready. At the moment I've been working on groups and group membership - I'm trying to set it up so that there can be any number of groups and users can be members of multiple groups - this level of flexibility when coupled with access permissions granted to group members should make DMCMS very flexible in terms of managing content access.

At the moment I'm thinking of access restrictions in terms of categories -

Basically when you create a category you assign access rights to one or more groups. - members of these groups will be able to access any content within the category. Members of other groups will not.

The same method is applied to the visbility of the category within the navigation structure - for users who are not a member of an assigned group the category will not be visible in the navigation menu.

Eventually I will extend this to a per article basis so that both categories and individual articles access restrictions can be set independently.

Other changes include the removal of forum integration - this will be re-written as a plugin and a complete re-write of the style / layout dues to too many issues with the current version.