I’ve decided to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu. This was a tortured decision for me to make, but the right one nonetheless.

While I’ve been able to do 99% of all my work and tasks in Ubuntu, it’s not always easy to do what I want to do. I have found that ease is more and more important to me as I have less and less time. When I want to buy a piece of hardware that will simplify my life, it should be easy to hook it up, install it, and get it running. Any delays, workarounds, and other distractions take away from the overall goal.

For example, I love my Quicken. I use it forecast, budget, and report on expenditures. I have One-Step Update running and all my passwords saved so it’s easy to download all my transactions. On Ubuntu, I have to run Quicken in a Crossover bottle. Yes, it works. But it wasn’t easy. And anytime there’s an upgrade or any issues, it’s not easy to troubleshoot and resolve.

I’ve gone paperless in my house, as much as possible. When bills come in, they get scanned then shredded. We’re also going through and scanning historical bills, statements, and other paper documents. We save everything as PDFs. Our scanners include dual-sided scanning via the ADF. The Windows driver works great with Adobe Acrobat. However, the driver for Linux supports only one sided scanning at a time. There is software to scan one side, then refeed the documents and scan the other side, and it will collate the images and let you save it as a PDF. But guess what? That’s right. It took work. Not easy.

The list goes on, of course. RAW image support in The Gimp takes longer to be released than Photoshop. Any new device may not work in Linux for some period of time. Etcetera, etcetera.

So I was able to install Windows XP on a separate HDD (which was supposed to be a mirror for my Ubuntu installation, but it wasn’t easy and I never figured it out). I did take the time to keep grub as the bootloader and I can successfully boot to either Linux or Windows.

Oh, one last word. Why Windows XP instead of Windows Vista or Windows XP x64? Guess. Not all drivers are available and compatible. That makes it… right… not easy.

I discovered on Thursday or Friday that I was using the non-smp capable version of my kernel.  Having a dual-core machine, that meant I was basically wasting half the processing power available to me (which I still probably never used).  I did have the right kernel installed, but it wasn’t booting that kernel by default.  So I learned a bit about grub and make the generic kernel default.

I also tested Quicken 2007 on Ubuntu 7.04, using Crossover.  Read about my failure here.

Lastly, I got my dedicated server configured the way I like it.  You see, I run a VM on my server for Scalix email.  The primary reason for this configuration is that Scalix doesn’t support as many server operating systems as I’d like.  It does support Fedora Core 5, so I have FC5 running in a VM on my server.  However, I had been previously unable (and unmotivated) to get the bridged networking configured properly.  So I had been using NAT and iptables to route to the VM.  Now my VM has a real IP address and my life will (or at least should) be easier.

Cool, I’m now an Advocate for Crossover Linux, specifically for Quicken 2007.  I’ll be updating the Tips & Tricks with my updated Quicken 2007 instructions soon.

OK, so it’s not exactly what I was thinking, but it’s actually the best of all worlds. Let me explain.

Intuit (via Quicken) is the leader of personal finance software. There’s just no disputing that statement. I spent time evaluating other solutions, and nothing even came close to Quicken. There’s a reason Intuit rules every category they’re in: they know what features customers want. (Full disclosure: I currently work for Intuit, but it has nothing to do with what I’m writing, as you’ll see this is not a review of Quicken)

Anyways, I’ve been running Quicken on Windows XP in a VMWare environment since I migrated to Ubuntu Linux. Last I had looked, Quicken 2007 (which is the version I use) was not compatible with wine (a Windows Emulator for Linux). However, I was reading a Linux magazine last night and saw that Quicken 2007 was now supported via Crossover Linux. I looked up Quicken 2007 support on the Codeweavers page this morning, and lo-and-behold someone gave it Silver rating! There were a few known issues, but everything had a workaround, so I decided to give it a try.

I first tried Wine on its own, but it was clear that wasn’t going to work. Whatever hacks (Tips & Tricks) the Codeweavers guys had figured out wasn’t going to work on Wine alone. I installed the trial of Crossover Linux and followed the convoluted instructions to get Quicken running. And it works!!  (See my updated instructions to get Quicken running here)

I don’t need Windows anymore at all! So screw you even more, Micro$oft!