With my new Ubuntu installation taking shape there are only a few things left to sort out to make it 100% functional as my primary web developing machine. So far I have not regretted making the change, especially as I can now run my beloved Ultraedit Studio within VMware on a virtual XP machine. The transition has been pretty seamless, the interface is intuitive and a pleasure to use. I have made a few minor customisations to help increase productivity and changed the theme to add a little eye candy.

The main change was adding in the Compiz manager so that I could enable a few additional desktop effects - specifically I added a 'hot corner' to the 'Scale' effect so that I could use it as an entourage type screen switcher - this also works great with VMware. Normally you need to press the 'ctrl' + 'alt' key combo to release the mouse focus from the VM - setting a hot corner to the top right of the screen means that the Scale effect is called regardless - no need to press the key combo - simply moving the mouse to the top right not only releases the mouse focus but also calls the scale effect. Checkout the screenshot on the left - The VMware screen integrates seamlessly with the rest of the applications. For the best effect you should turn off the tabs, toolbar and summary so that the VM looks like any other Application window. Click on the image to open up a larger version.

Using VMware this way has allowed me to retain the use of Ultraedit (which is good as bought a lifetime subscription - lol), but it does leave me with another small dilema - what cvs program do I use?????

Up until now I have used Tortoise CVS - an excellent program that integrated nicely into the windows shell. For a while I also used the CVS built into Ultraedit but found Tortoise to be far superior.

OK - No probs - I'll just carry on using tortoise...... NOPE....... only problem is that whilst the Virtual Machine can write to the shared folder via the Samba server (see previous article for file sharing between Ubuntu and a windows Virtual Machine) it does not seem to be able to use it for checking out CVS projects, this is a bit of a problem for me as I always check out the project files directly to my webserver root - I don't really want to check them out and then have to move move them - thats far too much work. The real solution is to find a suitable Linux CVS client. I guess my prerequisites are that it needs to have some kind of graphical interface or 'GUI' to be correct. I can't be bothered learning command line interactions for updating / commiting / adding files via the command line CVS client - and it needs to be compatible with the Sourceforge repository.

A little Google later and I have installed Crossvc (it's in the Ubuntu repository simply install it from Synaptics. Without reading up I quickly added a profile with the server info for the dmcms repository at Sourceforge. I then selected checkout from the project menu - after selecting the destination folder, browsing to the module I wanted to checkout and selecting a name for the folder I had checked out the latest version of DMCMS and had it automatically added to the Crossvc 'Workbench'. I had to manually type my password a couple of times - but it worked like a dream - the interface readily displays the current status of your project and also provides some nice features like file compare and version history.

At the moment I am trying to work out how to use my SSH key so that I only have to type my password in once - When I've figured it out I will update this post....