So we decided to buy a house, what will the journey look like?
There are plenty of easily-googlable resources on the house buying process in Canada and in Québec more specifically (here’s the two most detailed I’ve seen: FCAC and CMHC), so I won’t try to repeat that information, but I’ll document the specifics of our process which will invariably result in a brief outline of the steps to follow.
Roughly what we’ll try to do:
Get a relatively good family income so we can qualify for a reasonable mortgage loan.
Build up a credit history.
Save up for a down payment.
We’ve worked on those first three steps since we moved to Canada: I’ve been fortunate enough to have a stable and well-paid job, which has allowed us to use consumer credit responsibly, so should have a pretty good rating. It also allowed us to save for a down payment. So at this point we should be ready for the next parts of the process:
See a lender to get financially checked and pre-approved for a loan. You can go for a well-known financial institution, perhaps your bank, or you can go to a mortgage broker, which is what I’m planning on doing.
Once you know your price range, you can start looking at houses in your desired areas.
BUT before you can start with this, you should know roughly how much you can afford, be realistic with your inputs and use one of the available online calculators. I like this one which will tell you how much you should be able to afford, and this one which calculates your estimated payments. And this one is very simple but also very detailed as to the criteria used to estimate affordability. It makes sense to use this so you’re not disappointed when the broker tells you you can only afford a tiny shack in the boondocks :).
You should also have a pretty good idea of whether you like your target neighbourhood. Montreal is a geographically large city and neighbourhoods can differ, so it makes sense to check the ones you like and make a short list. If you don’t care where you buy, there’s something for almost any price range, but I don’t think that’s very common.
A possible problem with the neighbourhood you like is whether you can afford it. If you can’t just yet, there are two options: choose a different one or get more money (higher salary, larger down payment).
Once I identified our target neighbourhoods, I started scouring centris.ca frequently, looking for houses in (and out of) our price range, checking their pictures and prices, nearby amenities, and comparing several possible neighbourhoods. We ended up discarding one of those, even though it was cheaper and had more inventory, because we decided we didn’t really like it that much. So we’re focusing on one of the other candidates, and also looking at adjacent neighbourhoods, which can be cheaper while still being closer to the amenities we want.
OK, so knowing how much we can afford (per the calculators) having located (and lived in) a neighborhood we like and knowing the approximate price range for homes here, and knowing it is within our affordability, I’m ready to hit the mortgage broker.
If juju1 and juju2 are installed on the same system, juju1’s bash auto completion breaks because it expects services where in juju2 they’re called applications.
Maybe juju2 has correct bash completion, but in the system I’m working on, only juju1 autocompletion was there, so I had to hack the autocomplete functions. Just added these at the end of .bashrc to override the ones in the juju1 package. Notice they work for both juju1 and juju2 by using dict.get() to not die if a particular key isn’t found.
# Print (return) all units, each optionally postfixed by $2 (eg. 'myservice/0:')_juju_units_from_file(){python -c '
trail="'${2}'"
import json, sys; j=json.load(sys.stdin)
all_units=[]
for k,v in j.get("applications", j.get("services",{})).items():
if v.get("units"):
all_units.extend(v.get("units",{}).keys())
print "\n".join([unit + trail for unit in all_units])
'<${1?}}# Print (return) all services_juju_services_from_file(){python -c '
import json, sys; j=json.load(sys.stdin)
print "\n".join(j.get("applications", j.get("services",{}).keys());'<${1?}}
I’m working on adding some periodic maintenance tasks to a service deployed using Juju. It’s a standard 3-tier web application with a number of Django application server units for load balancing and distribution.
Clearly the maintenance tasks’ most natural place to run is in one of these units, since they have all of the application’s software installed and doing the maintenance is as simple as running a “management command” with the proper environment set up.
A nice property we have by using Juju is that these application server units are just clones of each other, this allows scaling up/down very easily because the units are treated the same. However, the periodic maintenance stuff introduces an interesting problem, because we want only one of the units to run the maintenance tasks (no need for them to run several times). The maintenance scripts can conceivably be run in all units, even simultaneously (they do proper locking to avoid stepping on each other). And this would perhaps be OK if we only had 2 service units, but what if, as is the case, we have many more? there is still a single database and hitting it 5-10 times with what is essentially a redundant process sounded like an unacceptable tradeoff for the simplicity of the “just run them on each unit” approach.
We could also implement some sort of duplicate collapsing, perhaps by using something like rabbitmq and celery/celery beat to schedule periodic tasks. I refused to consider this since it seemed like swatting flies with a cannon, given that the first solution coming to mind is a one-line cron job. Why reinvent the wheel?
The feature that ended up solving the problem, thanks to the fine folks in Freenet’s #juju channel, is leadership, a feature which debuted in recent versions of Juju. Essentially, each service has one unit designated as the “leader” and it can be targeted with specific commands, queried by other units (‘ask this to my service’s leader’) and more importantly, unambiguously identified: a unit can determine whether it is the leader, and Juju events are fired when leadership changes, so units can act accordingly. Note that leadership is fluid and can change, so the charm needs to account for these changes. For example, if the existing leader is destroyed or has a charm hook error, it will be “deposed” and a new leader is elected from among the surviving units. Luckily all the details of this are handled by Juju itself, and charms/units need only hook on the leadership events and act accordingly.
So it’s then as easy as having the cron jobs run only on the leader unit, and not on the followers.
The simplistic way of using leadership to ensure only the leader unit performs an action was something like this in the crontab:
* * * * * root if [ $(juju-run {{ unit_name }} is-leader) = 'True' ]; then run-maintenance.sh; fi
This uses juju-run with the unit’s name (which is hardcoded in the crontab – this is a detail of how juju run is used which I don’t love, but it works) to run the is-leader command in the unit. This will print out “True” if the executing unit is the leader, and False otherwise. So this will condition execution on the current unit being the leader.
Discussing this with my knowledgeable colleagues, a problem was pointed out: juju-run is blocking and could potentially stall if other Juju tasks are being run. This is possibly not a big deal but also not ideal, because we know leadership information changes infrequently and we also have specific events that are fired when it does change.
So instead, they suggested updating the crontab file when leadership changes, and hardcoding leadership status in the file. This way units can decide whether to actually run the command based on locally-available information which removes the lock on Juju.
The solution looks like this, when implemented using Ansible integration in the charm. I just added two tasks: One registers a variable holding is-leader output when either the config or leadership changes:
The second one fires on the same events and just uses the registered variable to write the crontabs appropriately. Note that Ansible’s “cron” plugin takes care of ensuring “crupdate” behavior for these crontab entries. Just be mindful if you change the “name” because Ansible uses that as the key to decide whether to update or create anew:
- name:create maintenance crontabstags: - config-changed - leader-elected - leader-settings-changedcron:name:"roadmr maintenance - {{item.name}}"special_time:"daily"job:"IS_LEADER='{{ is_leader.stdout }}'; if [ $IS_LEADER = 'True' ]; then {{ item.command }}; fi"cron_file:roadmr-maintenanceuser:"{{ user }}"with_items: - name:Delete all fooscommand:"delete_foos" - name:Update all barscommand:"update_bars"
A created crontab file (in /etc/cron.d/roadmr-maintenance) looks like this:
A few notes about this. The IS_LEADER variable looks redundant. We could have put it directly in the comparison or simply wrote the crontab file only in the leader unit, removing it on the other ones. We specifically wanted the crontab to exist in all units and just be conditional on leadership. IS_LEADER makes it super obvious, right there in the crontab, whether the command will run. While redundant, we felt it added clarity.
Save for the actual value of IS_LEADER, the crontab is present and identical in all units. This helps people who log directly into the unit to understand what may be going on in case of trouble. Traditionally people log into the first unit; but what if that happens to not be the leader? If we write the crontab only on the leader and remove from other units, it will not be obvious that there’s a task running somewhere.
Charm Ansible integration magically runs tasks by tags identifying the hook events they should fire on. So by just adding the three tags, these events will fire in the specified order on config-changed, leader-elected and leader-settings-changed events.
The two leader hooks are needed because leader-elected is only fired on the actual leader unit; all the others get leader-settings-changed instead.
Last but not least, on’t forget to also declare the new hooks in your hooks.py file, in the hooks declaration which now looks like this (see last two lines added):
Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention an existing bug in leadership event firing. Because of that, until leadership event functionality is fixed and 100% reliable, I wouldn’t use this technique for tasks which absolutely, positively need to be run without fail or the world will end. Here, I’m just using them for maintenance and it’s not a big deal if runs are missed for a few days. That said, if you need a 100% guarantee that your tasks will run, you’ll definitely want to implement something more robust and failproof than a simple crontab.
I had a hell of a time configuring Munin to send out e-mail alerts if values surpass specific thresholds. Many of the articles I found focused just on setting up the email command (which was the easy part), while few told me *how* to configure the per-service thresholds.
Once the thresholds are configured, you’ll see a green line for the warning threshold and a blue line for the critical one, like in this graph:
Some of Munin’s plugins already have configured thresholds (such as disk space monitoring which will send a warning at 92% usage and a critical alert at 96% or so). But others don’t, and I wanted to keep an eye on e.g. system load, network throughtput and outgoing e-mail.
The mail command can be configured in /etc/munin-conf.d/alerts.conf:
contact.myname.command mail -s "Munin ${var:group} :: ${var:host}" thisisme@somewhere.com
Next in /etc/munin.conf, under the specific host I want to receive alerts for, I did something like:
This will send alert if the postfix plugin’s volume surpasses 100k, if the load plugin’s load values surpass 1.0 or 5.0 (warning and critical, respectively) and if df plugin’s _dev_sda1 value is over 60% (this is disk usage).
Now here’s the tricky part: How to figure out what the plugin name is, and what the value from this plugin is? (if you get these wrong, you’ll get the dreaded UNKNOWN is UNKNOWN alert).
Just look in /etc/munin/plugins for the one that monitors the service you want alerts for. Then run it with munin-run, for example, for the memory plugin:
One of lxc’s nice time-saving features is that, after initial container creation, it will cache the files it downloaded to do so, and when you create a new container using the same template/version/architecture, it will leverage the existing files and create the container with minimal downloads and really quickly.
A downside of this is that the cache can become stale; this is apparent when you want to install a package in a container and apt-get gives 404 errors indicating the version of the package the container knows about, is no longer available in the archive (most likely superseded by a new one).
This is easily fixed by always doing apt-get update in the container prior to any package installs/upgrades. However, it’s cumbersome, and if you’re creating dozens of new containers every day, the bandwidth and time spent re-downloading can quickly add up.
To update the “base image” or cache, which resides in /var/cache/lxc for each version, you can do two things.
most templates also support --flush-cache so if you’re calling lxc-create directly, just add an extra --flush-cache as template args (after --) and the cache will be flushed before making the container. Something like
Sometimes you may want to configure a wireless interface on a system with Ubuntu Server. The most common use case (for me, at least) is to run some tests with server, which require two network interfaces, on a laptop (it’s what I have available to play with) with an ethernet interface and a wireless interface. As long as Ubuntu sees the wireless interface, it’s quite easy to set things up so the wireless comes up at boot time.
You will probably need to set up the server to forward and masquerade the internal network (usually, the ethernet segment is the internal one, while the wireless counts as the “outside” interface). There are plenty of tutorials to do this over the internet, so I won’t extend this post by detailing that.
Of course, the wireless will grab a dynamic IP address, so use caution with that as the address may change (or, assign a static one from your router’s unused range). Anyway. Put this in /etc/network/interfaces:
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).# The loopback network interfaceauto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.10.10.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid your-network-ssid
wpa-ap-scan 1wpa-proto RSN
wpa-pairwise CCMP
wpa-group CCMP
wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
wpa-psk your-network-password
Then you can do ifup wlan0 to bring the interface up. It should also come up automagically at boot time.
This was used to resync a file whose audio was consistently 1.75 seconds behind the video track. The resulting file also contains the first 2 subtitle tracks from the original file.
As part of the team that maintains several testing tools for Ubuntu, including checkbox, I sometimes find myself needing to build .deb packages from our source tree.
'building stuff is hard'
A simple way of achieving this is of course to run dpkg-buildpackage or even bzr-buildpackage. Assuming all build-deps are correctly installed in the host system, this will result in a nicely built set of .debs.
This approach has a few caveats, in that it’s different from the build process actually employed to create the packages that ultimately get uploaded to Ubuntu (or even the ones available in Launchpad PPAs).
The two main differences are that Launchpad builds the packages in a “clean” environment, installing build-deps from scratch, whereas dpkg-buildpackage will rely on what’s installed in the system. So if you miss specifying a build-dep, your local build may work because you have it installed, but the PPA build will fail because it will not be present.
The second big difference is that with the local approach, you’re “limited” to building packages for the “host” system. Sure, you can specify a different target release in your debian/changelog file, but some aspect of your build may be tied to your system’s tools, versions and layout, and if for some reason they don’t match the actual target at installation time, things will fail in interesting ways.
Clearly, one way to test what the Launchpad build process will spit out is to build a source package and dput that to be built directly on a PPA. The problem here is that the feedback loop becomes excruciatingly slow; PPAs are a shared resource and build times can go from minutes to many hours.
Based on all this, it makes sense to try to use a local build environment that more closely replicates what PPAs do to build your packages.
Fortunately, the PPA builders use free software, so it’s relatively easy to do local builds in a similar environment, completing quickly due to use of local resources, and only upload to Launchpad once you’re pretty sure your build will succeed.
The software in question is sbuild, and I already wrote a post detailing how to install sbuild and set up a build environment for any Ubuntu release you need.
This setup worked fine for the occasional package build when you know packaging is mostly correct. For a fast build such as checkbox, setting up the build environment with all needed packages and build-deps takes about 10 minutes (depending mostly on download speed for all the packages). Of course on a more complex package, compilation time may start to be a factor.
Anyway, the 10-minute time can be too slow if you’re trying to fix a tricky problem and need a fast feedback loop. Plus the process produces a lot of transient files and downloads a set of packages many times, so there’s plenty of room for improvement here.
A large part of the time spent doing the “local” part of the process is writing files to disk. One way to speed this up is to use a ramdisk to store the build. I’m too lazy and have too little RAM to use this approach, so the alternative was setting up eatmydata inside the chroot. Since these are mostly temporary files or throwaway packages, it’s OK to lose the safety of constant syncs in exchange for a huge boost in speed.
The setup for eatmydata inside the chroot is described here. This looks a bit hard to automate, but luckily we don’t have to, as recent versions of mk-sbuild simply support a –eatmydata parameter, if given this will install eatmydata inside the chroot and do the choot config file change to enable eatmydata.
Adding PPA
You can add a custom PPA to an image. Once the chroot image is built, enter the “golden master”:
sudo schroot -c source:saucy-amd64 -u root
You can add a deb line (get it from launchpad) to your sources:
cat >>/etc/apt/sources.list.d/something.list
# Copy line here
Then you need to get the GPG key for the PPA and add it manually with the very basic tools provided in the chroot (sorry, no apt-add-repository):
apt-key add -
# Paste GPG armored key here
Then exit the golden image. After this, your builds from this chroot will be able to fetch packages from the PPA.
Again, that’s a bit of work to do for each VM. Instead, what I did was create a file in /etc/schroot/setup.d to do this automatically. You can of course replace the PPAs you need in the echo lines at the end. Name the file something like 81add-ppas:
Notice that again, I was very lazy and instead of downloading the gpg keys as shown above (as for some reason trying to run gpg from the setup script didn’t work), I just configured apt to allow unauthenticated packages. Since this sbuild is mainly for testing purposes it’s not a big deal to skip this verification step. Also, there’s some logic to automatically detect the chroot release, so the same config file works equally well for any Ubuntu release.
Apt-cacher-ng
As the name suggests, this nifty utility will cache packages so the next time you need them they’ll be fetched from local storage rather than from the network. A bit of config is needed to have sbuild download packages from here.
First, install apt-cacher-ng on the host system. You can verify it’s listening on port 3142 by any means you like.
Then, to set it up automatically in chroots, add this to the host system’s /etc/schroot/setup.d/80apt-cacher-ng (rather, create that file; it doesn’t exist by default):
#!/bin/sh
set -e
. "$SETUP_DATA_DIR/common-data"
. "$SETUP_DATA_DIR/common-functions"
. "$SETUP_DATA_DIR/common-config"
if [ $STAGE = "setup-start" ] || [ $STAGE = "setup-recover" ]; then
echo "# Added by the schroot setup mechanism (roadmr)" > "${CHROOT_PATH}/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/80proxy"
echo "Acquire::http::Proxy \"http://127.0.0.1:3142\";" >> "${CHROOT_PATH}/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/80proxy"
fi
With these two setup.d scripts and the –eatmydata magic, it’s easy to create sbuild environments which will be much faster when building packages.
As a comparison, building msmtp (chosen because this tests mainly the speedup components, not needing any packages from a PPA) takes about 40 seconds with these suggested tweaks:
It looks like they’re about 3 times faster, but that’s misleading because I deliberately chose a small, quick-to-compile package. Still, you can at least reduce network and disk access very easily now. Note, also, that my test system has a fast SSD. Speedup on a traditional rotary magnetic hard-disk is likely to be much higher.
In late 2010, as I was starting a new job, I bought a new laptop, a Samsung QX410, based largely on this review.
From the beginning I was quite happy with that laptop: the screen is decent, the keyboard spacious and comfortable, battery life is OK, and in retrospective it’s a solidly-built laptop that stood up to 2.5 years of heavy daily use.
However, eventually the time came for it to die, so in late 2013 I had to start looking for replacements. Since I still needed to work, I borrowed a Lenovo Thinkpad T520 to use temporarily. Spec-wise it was similar to the Samsung, save for the larger 15″ screen and the thing that really spoiled me, the excellent Lenovo laptop keyboard. Alas, this appears to have been lost in the latest generation; I had a chance to try a Thinkpad X240 (one of the candidates for replacing the Samsung) and found the island-style keyboard odd and uncomfortable.
At the same time I was able to use a Dell XPS 13 for a few days, and the keyboard on that little machine felt extremely comfortable and close to the Samsung’s (which I’m already used to). So the XPS 13 immediately moved to the top of the list. In early 2014 I finally pulled the trigger and got the Developer Edition XPS 13. The Developer Edition is the result of the “Sputnik Project” and has been available for all previous XPS 13 generations. Here are my impressions of it.
The XPS 13 is somewhat of a MacBook Air lookalike with the same slim wedgy shape. While the footprint is a bit smaller than the 13-inch Air, they look very similar from a top view. The XPS’s top lid and frame are machined aluminum, though the similarity ends there, as the keyboard and deck are coated with black soft-touch rubber, and the bottom is black carbon fiber. The XPS is different enough to qualify as “inspired by”, rather than “knockoff of”.
Incidentally, the MacBook air was also on my list of candidate laptops. The XPS 13 beat it for a couple of reasons. The screen is higher-resolution and touch-enabled, it’s Ubuntu-certified and available with Ubuntu preinstalled, and it has a PC keyboard. Apple keyboards are great but I just can’t get used to the ctrl-alt-cmd layout and always keep hitting the wrong keys. Also, for a comparable configuration, cost was similar. So in the end the XPS 13 won.
Chassis
The XPS 13 is really thin, as befits a 13-inch ultrabook, and has the typical front taper to a 6-mm thinness.
The thing weighs about 1.4 kg. Since it’s so tiny it actually feels heavy for the size, but it’s by no means heavy. Carry it in a backpack and you’ll barely feel it’s there. Quite a difference from the 2.25-kg Samsung and the 2.5-kg Thinkpad T520, which looks and feels like a behemoth next to the XPS (A nostalgia shot of those laptops next to the XPS is at the end of this post).
To give an idea of the XPS’s dimensions I made a quick photo shoot next to some comparable pre-ultrabook ultraportables.
Top row shows a Dell Vostro V13 and an Acer Aspire One netbook (11″ screen). Bottom row includes the XPS 13 and the legendary Thinkpad X201 with 12″ screen. Despite having a 13″ screen, the XPS is smaller than the Thinkpad X201 and the V13. Footprint-wise, the screen is the limiting factor, so for a 13″-class system it’s reasonable to not see a huge difference.
The side view is where the XPS 13’s thinness becomes evident. The XPS 13 is on top, above the X201 and with the V13 at the very bottom.
The V13 was a tremendously thin machine for its generation, which shows in the fact that it’s almost as thin as the XPS 13’s rear. Of course, the XPS 13’s taper at the front is goes on to be about as thin as the V13’s screen. The V13 made performance compromises to fit in such a svelte chassis, but in all honesty the XPS 13 is also not a speed demon and also has fewer ports and expandability than other bulkier options.
The X201 isn’t even in the same league here; comparing the thickest parts (rear end) it’s almost 3 times thicker than the XPS 13. The X201 is still quite light, about 200g heavier than the X13, the chassis is incredibly sturdy (XPS 13 doesn’t feel flimsy at all but I’d hesitate to put it through the kind of abuse a Thinkpad is known to just shrug off), and it has a lot more expandability, in the form of more USB ports, an expresscard slot, a media card reader, ethernet and modem ports, and incredibly, a full VGA connector.
By comparison and list of ports, the XPS 13 only has a combo audio jack, 2 USB 3.0 ports, and a mini-DP port for external video. This is the price one pays for ultraportability…
In the following paragraphs I posted pictures of the XPS 13, open, next to the V13 and the X201. The keyboard looks minimalistic in comparison but it’s quite comfortable to use. The V13’s is not as nice, while the X201 has that fantastic Lenovo keyboard.
Keyboard and touchpad
The XPS 13’s keyboard has no extraneous dedicated keys, other than the power and mute buttons; everything else is handled by the standard keys, with F-keys doubling as special-function keys to switch monitors, control wireless, show battery information, control volume and brightness as well as keyboard backlight, and perform media control functions.
All standard keys are standard-sized and in their proper positions. Exceptions are the half-size F-keys, including insert and delete, and the cursor keys. One thing I don’t like is lack of dedicated page-up and page-down keys; these are handled (along with home and end) by the cursor keys in combination with Fn. I use pg-up and pg-down extensively to switch tabs in Firefox and this is really a sore point for me. But that’s about the only tradeoff this excellent keyboard makes.
The touchpad seems to be a synaptics model, one of those “buttonless” trackpads, although it does have distinct clicklable sections at the bottom. Unlike the Samsung’s touchpad which was very troublesome and only worked in tap-to-click mode, this touchpad’s clickable buttons also work perfectly, so you’re free to click or two-finger-tap anywhere, or use the “discrete” buttons if you like, which makes things like dragging much easier.
A backlit keyboard is nice to have, but when the light is on, an annoying high-pitched whine comes from underneath the keyboard. This problem has been reported to Dell by many users and is still awaiting a fix or response. As a result, I usually keep the backlight off.
Screen
Both the laptops I’ve been using lately had non-IPS panels with industry-standard resolutions for the time. 1366×768 for the Samsung is pretty typical. One gripe I had is that the Samsung’s screen was “protected” by a glossy sheet of cheap plastic that with time became very scratched and made the screen harder to see. This can be seen in the picture at the end of this post.
The XPS 13’s screen is stunning by comparison, if only because it’s a much newer panel. Viewing angles are amazing, the 1920×1080 resolution is razor-sharp and crisp (and even a bit too high for the screen size), and the backlight is strong enough to overcome the gorilla glass cover’s gloss. At least I expect it won’t get scratched easily. This is a Synaptics touchscreen which has worked very well with Ubuntu, although I haven’t used it all that much because it feels very alien to my workflow.
Performance and battery life
I’m ill-equipped to provide an assessment here, as the jump from the pre-Sandy Bridge Samsung to the Haswell XPS 13 (plus a bump from i5 to i7 CPU) is so enormous that this machine just feels like it flies. One thing worth mentioning is that, while the Samsung had a standard mobile CPU (i5 480M with 3M cache and 35W TDP), the XPS 13 has the aforementioned, newer i7 with 4 MB cache, but in a low-TDP (only 15W), ULV variant. So by its ultraportable nature it’s on the lower side of the specs spectrum, however the generational advantage plus i7-ness really do make a difference and the system is snappy at all times.
Perhaps the biggest leap forward is the LiteOn SSD. While not hooked up directly to PCIe like a MacBook’s, this mSATA drive is absurdly fast in comparison to what I’d been using, resulting in a 3-second boot time (even with disk encryption), way faster than the 20-30 seconds I was getting on the Samsung.
Under moderate load (a few terminal windows open where I’m typing stuff, plus a browser with a some tabs, one of which is playing a Youtube video), the XPS 13 reports a battery lifetime of about 6 hours. For comparison, the Samsung lasted about 3 hours with a comparable workload on a 66Wh battery.
Given a mostly-idle workload (browser with static content plus a few terminal windows), the XPS 13 reports about 8 hours of battery life.
Software
Perhaps the nicest thing about the XPS 13 is that it’s certified for Ubuntu, and the Developer Edition I got comes preinstalled with Ubuntu 12.04, augmented by some OEM-specific tweaks to ensure all the hardware works correctly. Indeed everything works out of the box, and the first-boot experience is very smooth and polished, definitely less cumbersome than booting a Windows machine for the first time.
In case it’s needed, a utility to create a recovery disk is provided. I created a USB stick which can be used to quickly restore the machine to factory status. I then proceeded to erase the preinstalled Ubuntu version and install the latest development release (which will be released as Ubuntu 14.04). Don’t get me wrong, the preinstall is perfectly usable for 99% of people as it has a typical Ubuntu installation with all the usual tools, receives security and browser upgrades until 2017, and even includes a plethora of cloud software development tools such as Juju and Virtualbox (this is why it’s called a “Developer edition” and is focused on cloud development). However, because of my work, I really wanted to have the newest possible Ubuntu version. An ulterior motive was to verify whether the OEM-specific tweaks in the preinstalled version were “upstreamed” and made available in subsequent Ubuntu versions. This is a policy for the Ubuntu certification program; whenever possible, the work done when enabling a new machine is made available in the following stock Ubuntu release.
With a couple of exceptions, everything continued to work just as it did with the preinstalled version, and I was able to recreate a working environment complete with a transfer of my backup in only a few minutes. The fast SSD and USB3.0 transfers from my backup drive are partly to thank for this.
As exceptions, the touchpad didn’t get recognized and required blacklisting an i2c-hid module; and I lost the media control keys (which I seldom use, so I haven’t bothered to re-enable them).
This makes it a great alternative for regions where the Developer Edition is unavailable; just procure the Windows version of this laptop and installing the latest Ubuntu will result in a working system.
Here’s a quick overview of the things I didn’t like about the XPS 13. Of course, none of them were deal-breakers for me, but I wanted to sum them up to highlight the fact that yes, it’s not a perfect machine.
Whining electrical noise (a defect, so once Dell confirms this is fixable I’ll apply for warranty service).
Lack of dedicated pgup/pgdn keys.
Screen a bit too glossy.
a dearth of ports.
Screen resolution too high for my poor, tired eyes (I’m half-kidding with this one).
To sum up, despite the above, I very highly recommend the XPS 13 Developer Edition. In addition to the sleek and solid hardware, you get Ubuntu preinstalled which will cover 99% of people’s needs, a system which benefits from the upstreamed enablement work resulting in an excellent platform to run the latest Ubuntu, *and* you send the message that Ubuntu preinstalls are desired by users, all while freeing yourself from the Microsoft tax which has plagued Linux laptop users for so long.
Projects on github will show a README or README.md file directly on the project page. This is a good place to give some introduction or quick instructions for your project. This supports Markdown, which allows you to craft a README that will both be readable when seen in plain text, and will render nicely when seen directly in github.
Here’s a handy Markdown syntax reference and tutorial. Also, at some point I needed clarification on how to make nested lists, which I found in StackOverflow. There’s a wealth of Markdown-related information on the web!
Two useful tidbits. To render a markdown document to HTML, for previewing so you don’t have to upload stuff to github just to see what your README will look like,
apt-get install python-markdown
and then run
markdown_py
on your README.md.
Also, vim supports markdown and will do its best to help you, but one unhelpful thing is its insistence to render underscores (_) in inverted text (as it assumes it’s the beginning of an underlined section). Just a warning 🙂
