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Cary Millsap posts a brilliant article about his approach to performance troubleshooting that resonated loudly with me.

When I first started working at Siebel, a standard review was a production health check that consisted of meetings with key project staff (Siebel Administrator, DBA, systems and network admins, project manager, developers) coupled with some standard checks on key Web, Siebel and Oracle configuration parameters.

At the tail end of one engagement where I had precious little to note or report on, I asked to meet with an end user for a brief chat. The response was surprising and not dissimilar to the standard retorts Cary describes.

• 'Talk to a user ? Why on earth would you want to do that ?' (delivered with suspicious frown)

• 'The user won't understand your questions.' (patronising)

• 'The users don't understand the business requirements.' (surprising and worrying)

• 'The users are too busy.' - 'Can't you just talk to a supervisor instead ?'

Of course, most of these responses are instinctive, defensive measures, immediate responses to what is probably a rather unusual request and, to be fair and in the interests of balance, I have been introduced to end users by development staff who do know and obviously have a healthy relationship with the user community.

If and when I succeeded in getting an audience with an actual user, I didn't actually chat at first. Instead I introduced myself and simply asked if I could watch the individual use the system for 10 minutes.

It was often very enlightening just to sit quietly and observe the business process (typically, handling an inbound call at a call centre), the subset of available screens accessed by the agent, typical searches executed to locate data, actions they expected to be slow, actions they needed to be fast, common tasks they did frequently, lengthy interactive queries that were truly batch reports as well as interactions with other applications.

I have been running Linux Mint for 8 weeks now and Ive been delighted with it. My desktop PC is fast and responsive and I am hugely impressed by the sheer amount and quality of software available for Linux. Printing, scanning, wireless networking, audio, DVD writing and all my USB devices just work.

I don't have a virus scanner consuming memory and chewing clock cycles. I am no longer considering a memory upgrade as Linux works fine with my paltry 512MB.

I have all my favourite applications available (Picasa, Chrome, FileZilla, Emacs). Linux is brilliant as a development platform and installing software is easy. The Mint desktop looks great and with the addition of Microsoft TrueType fonts, my display is razor sharp and crystal clear.

Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, my wife has also embraced the change. She now uses Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express, Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Word and Excel and Nautilus instead of Windows Explorer. All of this was fairly transparent and painless.

This fulsome praise all sounds like an advert for the wonders of freedom loving, a precursor for some open source software evangelism and a concerted attempt to convert the great unwashed to Linux. However, there is an elephant sitting in the room. Right there - in the corner.

The Ubuntu and Linux Mint (which is based on Ubuntu) distributions have a 6 month development cycle. This means that a new release will appear twice a year which is great because users know when the next major release is due. In addition, minor fixes, security patches and improvements are continually being pushed out via automatic updates. What is not so good is the actual process of upgrading to a major release which, in my opinion, is relatively complicated and risky for an inexperienced, new user.

To be fair, Linux Mint are upfront and honest and describe the upgrade process fully, the options available and the pros and cons of each approach.

'There is no guarantee that it will work for you. In fact, this [dist upgrade] is quite a risky process. If you're experienced and if you know how to troubleshoot and solve common Linux problems then you're probably OK. If you're a novice user we recommend you perform a fresh installation of Linux Mint 8 instead.'

David Marsden is an experienced Linux user and comments that he is comfortable performing Ubuntu upgrades, quickly and reliably without losing his data. He claims that Ubuntu upgrades are quicker and easier than applying a Windows Service Pack.

Of course, David's absolutely right. Even I managed to upgrade to Linux Mint 8 at the first attempt without losing any of my user data and even managed to preserve the configuration settings for all my favourite applications. In fact, apart from the modified login screen and wallpaper, the four people who use the Linux computer would have struggled to notice the change, it was that transparent.

In fact, all I needed to do was:

• When originally installing Linux, create dedicated, separate partitions for user home directories and data. I use '/home' (user directories) and '/data' (music, photos, documents).

• Try to stick to the default Mint (and Ubuntu) software repositories.

• Note down the additional applications and software packages you have installed.

• Jot down user and group id's (copy '/etc/passwd' and '/etc/group').

• Backup the home and data file systems (twice). Check the numbers of files. Check the size of the directories. Check the checksums. Check the backups are readable. Check the hidden directories. Check the backup disk isn't full. Check everything.

• Burn the Install CD and install the 'upgrade'.

• Preserve the '/home' and '/data' file systems, leaving all existing data intact. You did remember to jot down that '/home' is '/dev/sda6' and '/data' is '/dev/sda8', didn't you ?

• Move '/home/user' to '/home/user.backup'. Repeat for each user account. This ensures that Gnome and desktop related settings are re-created.

• Re-create the necessary user accounts and ensure the user and group identifiers are the same as before.

• Selectively, copy the various, 'hidden' dot directories for applications (Rythmbox, Picasa, Pidgin) back into the user directory to preserve the application settings.

• Reconfigure wireless networking.

• Reconfigure the printer.

• Remove the irritating fortune cookie from 'Terminal' (Mint only).

Now I am fairly technical and understand most of this. I have no problem whatsoever doing all of this. David is correct - all of this is common sense, quick to do and the whole process takes less than 2 hours. I don't even mind repeating this process every six months because, as David points out, I have a new, shiny operating system with new features, additional applications, bug fixes and improvements.

What I have a problem with is trying to explain this whole, convoluted process to my father. Or rather, rescuing his system after he has failed to follow this process. Remotely.

Of course, my father has a few options available. If it ain't broke, don't fix it - if Mint Gloria works fine than stick rather than twist. Alternatively, he could use a distribution that automatically performs rolling upgrades so his software is always the latest and greatest.

The first (and probably the last) in a very occasional series.

Channel 5. Thursday night.

Arsenal fans taunting Liverpool on their unwanted appearance in the Europa Cup.

After buying most of my Christmas presents from them, Amazon kindly gave me a £2 voucher to spend in the MP3 download store.

As the festive season of hosting friends and family approaches, I decided on a 'easy listening', 'middle of the road' purchase suitable for all the family to act as a quiet backdrop while we gather to play charades around the fire.

'Killing Joke' by 'Killing Joke' was one of the first vinyl records I ever bought and, as always, I was introduced to the band by the wonderful John Peel. I was intrigued by the cover art which I still think is brilliant.

Killing Joke also used another very striking and evocative image. When I visited a mate in London, I was surprised to see he had a massive Killing Joke poster adorning his lounge of Nazis saluting the Pope. Initially, I thought it was a mock-up but he told me it was a genuine photograph from the 1930's and while he wasn't a right-wing fascist (quite the contrary in fact), he also thought it was a very striking and thought provoking image.

I'm pleased to report the LP sounds as fresh as it did 30 years ago. Deserves to be played loud.

Dear Father - It is 6 weeks since my last confession. Since then I have...

• Installed Thunderbird 3 which handles all my work email. This upgrade went smoothly enough although there were some minor glitches with server authentication and message filters. Thunderbird 3 adds tabs, UI enhancements, IMAP synchronisation, much needed improvements to the address book in addition to faster searching.

• Upgraded my desktop PC to Linux Mint 8. Again, this went smoothly enough, mainly because I did a full blown install while carefully preserving my user data. Until Linux upgrades are 'rolling' and as easy as applying a Windows Service Pack, Linux will never succeed in the mainstream.

• Installed Google Chrome on Mint 8. This was probably the only software I missed from Windows and God, I had forgotten how much faster Chrome is than Firefox. Chrome is blindingly fast on Linux, staggeringly fast, unbelievably fast.

Playing around with DokuWiki to replace Diigo and Google Notebook in an effort to use more open source software and get more of my data under my control.

• Installed Laconica 0.8.2 so Billy has his very own sandpit to play with spammers in.

• Upgraded this blog to the latest bleeding edge of Habari (0.7 alpha) and was relieved to see it still worked.

'Go in peace, my son. Admirable efforts but my sources tell me you are flagrantly continuing to use freedom hating, Microsoft TrueType Fonts to enhance your browsing experience on Linux, so please say three Hail Mary's and an Our Father as penance. Go in peace to love and serve RMS.'

Im not a big fan of American soccer. Neither am I a great fan of womens football wherever it is played. Elizabeth Lambert has just changed that state of affairs.

The rumour mill back home claims that Alex Ferguson is planning an audacious £34 million bid in January to replace Vidic.

This conversation didnt actually take place but it could have.

Last week, friends and I were discussing µblogging in the pub. Well not µblogging exactly but two ladies had recently discovered Facebook and were talking about the pros and cons of this wonderful social network.

One lady said: ‘Oh and another thing - I really don't like the ‘Jenny is…' status update. I just don't get it.'

The other lady replied ‘Yeah - that bit is stupid. I am hardly going to write down ‘Marilyn is…just off to Asda for the weekend shop'.

I then interjected: ‘But you don't have to put down minutiae after the ‘is…' part'. You can put anything. For example, I might choose to write

‘Norman is….seriously considering jacking his job in, pursuing his dream and opening a record shop'.

They looked at me as though as I was mad. My mate sighed and said ‘Right - who's up for another ?'

Jenny stared at me as though I had two heads and said ‘What ? You're going to open a record shop ? In these tense and difficult times. Are you serious ?'

A few years ago, on a Wednesday night, I returned from work and Norma told me in passing that she had got a man coming to clean our carpets for free.

Ten minutes later, I found myself welcoming not one but two Kirby salesmen into my house. What followed was possibly the worst 96 minutes of my life (with the possible exception of yesterday's fixture at Anfield).

I am normally polite and well mannered so I dutifully sat with my cup of tea and listened to the sales guy's pitch about the miscellaneous wonders of the Kirby vacuum cleaner.

After a while of professional, polished and non-stop patter, I interjected and tried to ask 'OK - this sounds great but how much is it ?' in an effort to curtail proceedings but was ignored.

I waited patiently as he assembled various attachments for dog hair, vacuuming the inside of the car and accessing the hard to reach areas behind radiators.

I got slightly more irritated as Norma excused herself to make tea for the kids and the senior salesman passed over to the junior apprentice for phase 2.

I cursed silently as Norma returned and asked 'Listen - you've been here 25 minutes now. When are you going to hoover my carpets for me ?'. Without pausing for breath, senior sales guy triumphantly plugged in the vacuum cleaner, and proceeded to clean and re-clean a 4 inch square of my lounge carpet. He then instructed his stooge to dump the contents onto a white cloth and invited us both to examine the contents in minute detail.

It was dust. Not that fascinating.

Again, I interjected with 'Listen - I'm really not interest-' but was interrupted with 'OK - now we will hoover your bed for you. Please bring your current hoover upstairs'. To my horror, Norma led them upstairs where they apparently lifted up a duvet and vacuumed the mattress of my 6 year old daughter. Twice.

Two more pristine white cloths was brought out and we poured over the skin debris that a human leaves behind on the sheets when asleep. We compared and contrasted the superlative results of the Kirby which has lifted much more dirt than our Panasonic hoover.

Norma, feeling incredibly guilty and no doubt a little embarrassed, now started to assert herself and politely asked the salesmen to leave as it was now the kids' bedtime.

Still, the two sales guys persisted as, after what seemed like hours, we entered the home straight and the the closing of the deal. Finally, we got to a price. It was a lot - I think it was over £2,000 which almost made me spill my now cold cup of tea. I countered with 'Come on, I can get a Panasonic for £200 from Comet' and the sales guy immediately replied with his 'Objection-Retort' from the school of pressure selling about the benefits of the Kirby and its lifetime guarantee.

My wife left the room. I could tell she was now quite upset at the imposition of having these chaps in our house, interrupting our routine. People who upset my wife (with one honourable exception - me) tend to upset me so I now got slightly more forceful.

'Listen, chaps. I realise my wife invited you here this evening but she thought she was getting her carpets cleaned for free not a gentle, prolonged, high pressure sales pitch. We've got a hoover. We're not looking to buy a hoover and we certainly would never contemplate a Kirby hoover that cost over £2,000.'

Senior salesman piped up with 'Ah but that's the good news Mr. Brightside - if you commit tonight, I can offer you a 40% discount.'

I sighed inwardly and stared at the mantelpiece. I was transfixed. I stared again at the clock on the mantelpiece. The time was 7:41pm on a Wednesday night.

I stood up, folded up the white cloth, put the assorted attachments back into the box and handed it to the junior apprentice.

'Listen lads. I realise you're only doing your job but my wife has politely asked you to leave. I have also politely asked you to get out of my house but United are playing in Lyon and the game kicks off in 4 minutes so now I telling you to get your fucking stuff together and leave. Now.'

Senior sales guy could now (finally) see the writing on the wall and started moaning about how we'd wasted their time - a little ironic as I viewed it as them wasting our time - and started to protest and call me rude names.

I ignored him, turned the TV on, picked up his box of tricks and his catalogues and ushered them both to the door.

Driving along the M25, my son noticed some large graffiti on a bridge

Give peas a chance

Norman Junior III: 'Hmm - that's interesting 'Give peas a chance' - what does that mean ?'

Me: 'Well these days broccoli and green beans are getting really popular so these people just want us all to give peas a chance.'

17 seconds silence then both of us burst out in uncontrollable laughter.

Update: A picture is worth a thousand words (or peas).

After the Yak was shaved, we suddenly realised we had missed Football Focus and proceeded directly to the casting couch.

I fully appreciate that evaluating a Linux distribution is just 18 minutes and 32 seconds isn't probably sufficient to probably gain a full picture of the capabilities (or otherwise) of any software let alone a full blown operating system.

However, this superficial, high level, cursory review of all the distros below is useful as it solely focuses on the installation process, ease of use - both of which are key for prospective Linux users; particularly those people who might be looking to migrate, as in my case, from Windows.

Ubuntu (Hardy Heron)¶

As I have installed Ubuntu before, this was fairly straightforward. As I now had the full 80GB disk to play with, I allocated four 20GB partitions (root, home, apps and data).

The installation prompted for my timezone, keyboard type and was pretty quick. Once I rebooted, I was able to configure my Linksys wireless adapter and access the network. As I was using a Ubuntu version that was 12 months old, the system update utility soon notified me that I had over 800MB of available updates which I downloaded.

I was mortified to see the file transfer speeds was variable. Very variable - it ranged between 35-50 KB/sec and I also noticed the strength of the wireless signal was incredibly sporadic. On Windows, I would consistently get a signal strength between 75 and 95%. This computer was in the same room as the router with clear line of sight. I tried browsing the Web - the experience was painful, It was like the bad old days of 56KB dialup modems. I killed the system update which only improved the state of affairs slightly.

I then discovered that there was a Ubuntu mirror hosted by my ISP (Virgin Media) so reconfigured system update appropriately but still - no improvement. A ping to ubuntu.virginmedia.com took 4-5 seconds - yes seconds - not milliseconds. A ping from another Windows PC in the house took 20 ms. This was a major concern and might kill this experiment dead in its tracks with yet another Windows install beckoning.

Another of my concerns about adopting Linux full-time was printer support so I was delighted to see that drivers for my Canon IP4000 inkjet printer were included in a comprehensive list and printed a test page to prove it.

I imported photos, music and documents from my external USB Windows (NTFS) drive (which just needed to be mounted as 'root'). OpenOffice was able to read all my Word 2003 (and 2007) documents, Excel spreadsheets (and PDF's were also accessible using Document Viewer. I could view photos fine and I intended to use F-Spot to manage my photo library.

I was puzzled to see Evolution installed as the default email client so I installed Thunderbird and configured it to access Virgin Media email servers to send and receive email which worked fine.

Mint 5¶

Next, I installed another year old distribution - Mint 5 with the XFCE desktop interface (as opposed to the more common Gnome desktop which comes with Ubuntu).

Again, I simply reformatted the root partition and left the user data well alone. Mint looked impressive and has a slightly better utility to manage the wireless network. I was offered the chance to install 'Restricted' packages for proprietary software (e.g. the nVidia drivers, Flash). Open source purists may object but I accepted the invitation. I was rewarded by being able to play YouTube videos straight away with no fuss. I recall hunting around on Ubuntu for ages until I discovered the 'Restricted-Extras' package.

My main concern, the performance of the networking seemed unchanged (not wholly surprising as I believe Mint 5 is also based on Hardy Heron).

OpenSUSE¶

Next up was OpenSUSE which offered a slightly different administration interface and a green theme. This was another old CD and I was gratified and hugely relieved to see that OpenSUSE started loading system updates at a decent speed (500-705KB/sec). If all else failed, I could also revert to this distro although I wasn't entirely comfortable with the Nautilus File Manager after becoming accustomed to Gnome.

CrunchBang¶

CrunchBang was an interesting distro with a very different interface - Black background, very minimalist with a handy system dashboard (CPU, memory, disk utilisation) with all applications were available from a right-click menu.

I really liked CrunchBang as it appeared to have a small set of carefully selected and useful packages without being overly cluttered with megabytes of additional software. I prefer distros with a compact base where I can then install additional software as required.

If I was the sole user of the computer, I probably would have gone for CrunchBang as the monochrome, minimalist beauty of the desktop was appealing. However I doubted that Norma would be as comfortable with the cut-down interface and funereal colour scheme.

Fedora¶

I embarked on the now familiar installation process but once Fedora booted, I got a couple of disconcerting kernel diagnostic error messages when using Firefox and the automatic system update failed. There was also a worrying amount of blue - both during the installation process and on the default theme.

Debian¶

I dearly wanted to love Debian as I get the impression it is the distribution of choice for Linux aficionados and the technically minded crowd. Also, it had lots of red during the installation process which was very promising.

By now, I was getting bored of these time consuming full blown installations onto hard disk so thought I would evaluate the remaining distros simply using the Live CD approach and make allowances for any sluggish performance.

Unfortunately, Debian assume that Debian is the one and only and the best Linux distribution for you so you will obviously be installing the software on to the hard disk. For some reason, (as far as I could see) Debian don't see fit to provide a Live CD so people can choose to evaluate their software so, once again, I found myself performing a full blown installation.

Thus far, every single Linux distro had correctly auto-detected, configured my Linksys wireless adapter and managed to connect to my Linksys Router (running Tomato firmware) which was a pleasant surprise.

But not Debian. Oh no - although the WiFi card was recognised and I could enable wireless networking, see the available networks, enter my WPA credentials, Debian stubbornly refused to connect. There seemed to be a worrying assumption that all wireless networks used WEP and I felt I would have to do some serious digging to fix this and that somehow because I wasn't prepared to do so, I was unworthy to have the privilege of running Debian. Maybe it's some sort of Debian initiation ceremony. In any case, life's too short.

Arch¶

Arch is an interesting distro - it uses a character based installer. It reminded me of installing SUSE Linux way back in November 1999 when I had to recompile the kernel in order to get the mouse to work. Having been spoiled by all the GUI installers, I was tempted to give up on Arch there and then but proceeded until the partitioning utility decided that I had overlapping partitions (which was odd as every other distribution disagreed) and refused to go any further.

PCLinuxOS¶

Another short lived experiment - some obtuse failure meant I wasn't able to evaluate this distro.

Mandriva¶

Finally, I looked at Mandriva which was a great looking distro and very user friendly. I particularly liked the WiFi management utility. It also performed well (even booting off the Live CD).

Ubuntu 9.04¶

After all this effort, I still had a nagging doubt, that I was using dated versions of Ubuntu and Mint that were more than 12 months old. As there will have been a lot of updates and two full releases during this period, I decided to burned two more CD's for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) and Mint 7 (Gloria). My main reason was to see if the problems with my wireless Linksys card was resolved in the current stable version of Ubuntu and I also wanted to try the Gnome version of Mint.

Sure enough, support for the wireless USB adapter in Jaunty seemed much, much better and I was able to use the network normally and large downloads were now as quick as with Windows and Open SUSE.

Mint 7 (Gloria)¶

The Linux Mint distribution is based on Ubuntu which means you can also access the Ubuntu repositories which have a wealth of software packages.

I liked the look and feel of Mint 5 (using the smaller, lightweight XFCE desktop) and was similarly impressed by Mint 7 (using Gnome).

The software update process is slightly more refined on Mint than Ubuntu - updates are classified based on priority.

The clinching factor in Mint's favour was the new Mint Menu introduced in Mint 7 which offered a (I hesitate to say it), a start menu that would be reassuringly familiar to Windows users.

The desktop interface was simple, stylish and uncluttered and I liked the Mint management tools. Also, support for an Ubuntu based distro would be easily available.

So that was it - after a day of evaluating various Linux distributions, I decided to go for Mint 7. Now the boring bit was over with, it was time to sit back and enjoy my new computer.