Since my last posting I have made some progress in developing my case for switching one of my home computers to Linux. The other home computer will probably stay at Windows for the time being, but with the maximum amount of privacy configured on it. This computer will run a few packages I haven't yet discovered how to substitute in Linux.
One of the killer Windows packages for my line of work has been RD Tabs which provides a tabbed interface to Remote Desktop sessions. As it happens there are several RDP clients in Linux but Remmina is the tabbed equivalent you have to have for remote session management. The version that came in my distro was an old version and needed to be updated. The instructions here at askubuntu.com turned out to be straightforward and exactly what was needed to get an update to version 1.1.1 of Remmina:
These involved opening a terminal session and typing in several commandlines. After screeds of hieroglyphics had scrolled past the commands completed successfully and the installation was able to be tested, and works just as it should. To summarise, the commands required to be executed were:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:remmina-ppa-team/remmina-master
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install remmina remmina-plugin-rdp
So there is Remmina. Another solution that is helping me to progress a migration process that still has a few steps needed to bring it to implementation stage.
Another thing I have been looking at is ntfs-3g. This is supposedly a very reliable read and write NTFS driver that I can use to access NTFS disks on a Linux computer. It will have value when I need to migrate data from the computer, that is backed up on a NTFS disk, onto Linux's file system. I have not yet worked out whether I can do a RAID-1 array with the Logical Volume Manager easily as yet. But I do not expect that ntfs-3g is going to support a NFTS RAID-1 software array with LVM, it will be better to switch the disks to a native Linux filesystem whatever is the best option and put the RAID onto that.
Attempting to update QGIS to the current development release 2.12.x has not been quite so straightforward. My reference instructions came from this Qgis page:
Going to the Debian/Ubuntu section and looking at ubuntugis requirement.
The problem is we end up with public key errors and even after following the instructions in relation to the keyserver I am still getting this error message:
- W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net trusty InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 089EBE08314DF160
That error had me stumped last night. However I managed to lookup the precise message today and ended up back at askubuntu.com where I found this thread:
Then I executed this command:
- sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 089EBE08314DF160
Then I updated the cache.
Update Manager then was found to have qgis 2.12.3 listed as an update package and I installed the update along with a number of others. I therefore now have the latest version of Qgis. The next step will be to play with it with an existing Qgis project to see if it is as easy to use as the Windows version.
