Dropbox v Ubuntu One

Here is a good head-to-head comparison between Dropbox and Ubuntu One. I cannot speak to everything in the article, but I can say that I have Dropbox working on two Linux machines and three Windows machines (2 XP, one Vista) and have always found the installation process extremely fast and painless. I have tried to get Ubuntu One working on my two Linux machines, but for my home machine, it always seems to trigger a problem that kills X, which is not good.

The thing that Ubuntu One does that Dropbox doesn't is sync contacts, but that's not an issue for me because I use Google to store and manage contacts anyway, and Zindus to access them in Thunderbird.

So I'm in agreement with the take-away: Use Dropbox, not Ubuntu One.

That being said, if I invite you to Dropbox and you join in, I get a bump in storage space. So, please, get Dropbox.

Windows Essentials?

OK, I munged it up. I couldn't create new accounts or add new MSI packages to the netbook. It had to go. It had to go. The problem I had was that my install media was on CDROM, but the netbook, being a netbook, has no optical drive from which to read a CDROM. But college campuses collect computer geeks and computer gear, so a quick Hey Rube got me a loaner USB optical drive. (What's crazy is that this drive is almost exactly the size of the netbook. I'll put up a picture tomorrow.)

So, I have the initial install. That was fast enough. There's the drivers to make the thing usable. I shoved a chunk of 'em onto my thumb drive, but I am sure I missed more than a few, including the work printer. After that, go to windowsupdate and get the thing up to the newest. And honestly, I'm still downloading and installing Service Pack 3 here. But that's just minimal function. We're not talking apps yet.

First place I went to was Ninite. There's an awful lot installers you can get at once. I picked up a bunch of browsers — I rock Firefox because Delicious has my bookmarks, but I have Chrome and Safari running, too — plus Hulu and VLC, Microsoft Security Essentials for virus protection and such, .Net and Dropbox and CCleaner and Notepad++ and PuTTY. Not a bad bunch of stuff, but not complete.

Dave Winer calls Dropbox the coolest software of the decade. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm close. It is pretty neat.

I live in a very networked world, and I have 15GB of SSD total on this thing, so I'd rather run Google Apps for what few Office Suite things I need and keep the space. I mean, if I'm somewhere not home and not work, it's very unlikely that I need an office suite. So, I went to get the Google Pack.

All things told, I probably shouldn't have put on Google Earth. Probably too big with little enough use. We'll see.

There's also a whole bunch of tweaks for XP that only come from the source. Power Toys. I first went for TweakUI, but the ClearType Tweaker and Alt-Tab replacement, are really near-essential add-ons. And Virtual Desktop Manager is SO nice.

But that doesn't get into the core issues. I have IE6. It is inexcuable to not have IE8. I need PowerShell. It isn't a Gnome terminal with a bash shell, but it's better than Command Prompt.

He's a few required SourceForge bits. Synergy allows you to share one keyboard and mouse across many computers, which is great when I'm at work. I can type on a netbook keyboard but I probably couldn't work on one, program on one. And there's XMing, an X server for Windows, which connects to the crucial PuTTY and allows you to have your big heavy windowing applications run on the big server and show up on the netbook as just the pictures.

One thing I'm pondering but not decided on is Growl for Windows. It's like my beloved notify-osd with a networking protocol bolted onto it, it seems.

Which leads me to these few questions: I need a Perl, but do I need Strawberry or Activestate? And is Notebook++ good enough for my programming on Windows needs, or should I get Komodo Edit? I've gone Komodo for 80% of my coding work.

And the big one. What did I forget? What Windows program have I omitted that's essential and just plain cool?

Trying Dropbox

I'm trying DropBox. It seems neat. I'm at work. I have two machines running, my main Linux box and my XP netbook. I have a directory in Linux, /home/jacoby/Dropbox/, where I can put things. I put it there, and after some time for uploading and downloading, the items in that directory are placed in C:/Documents and Settings/jacoby/My Documents/My Dropbox/ on my netbook, and the ~/Dropbox/ directory at home.

Isn't that cool?

I can also tell DropBox to share a subdirectory or file with friends who also use DropBox.

This is where you come in.

Sign up and you get to share things with me, and we both get 256MB additions to our default 2GB disk quota.

The thing I'm starting to do is put the images I use a lot, my favorite user icons and background images, in ~/Dropbox/Photos? so that they're effortlessly spread across all the places I'd use them. I'm also considering a ~/Dropbox/bin/ directory that will hold the scripts I go to most often. A poor excuse to not sit down and learn to love git, true, but still kinda neat.