Ubuntu's been a rage over the last 2-3 years, however it definately seems to be catching on with a lot of folks as a possible OS of choice, with the widespread dissatisfaction around MS Vista. I decided to really give Ubuntu the spin to see if I really would develop applications and do my daily work in that environment - it's one thing saying Ubuntu's an alternative to Windows, its another to actually get the tools for the job working on this OS.
So first thing I did was to install Ubuntu using Wubi from within Windows Xp. This to me is a really cool piece of software, as Ubuntu looks like any other Windows program installed. However, it actually allows Ubuntu to be booted when your pc's turned on by adding an entry to the Windows boot menu. Ubuntu is installed within a file in the Windows file system (c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk), this file is seen by Linux as a real hard disk. The install didn't take too much time, about 20 minutes on my Toshiba M700. So essentially, you're not running Ubuntu in a virtualized mode.
While Ubuntu looks pretty good, the UI doesn't necessarily looks extraordinary. So I decided to jazz it up to look like the MacOS X. Take a look at this. On the left, that's what my desktop looks like now.
So now that I had the system look spiffy, I decided to do some real Java work on it. With Synaptic software manager, I installed JDK 1.5. I also downloaded MyEclipse 6.5. Now for the application server, I decided to use Weblogic - one of the more common enterprise wide application servers in use in production environments. I downloaded the RedHat version of Weblogic 10 MP1. For the database, MySQL was the obvious choice and Synaptics makes that an easy install.
Finally, after all that, I got a JEE5 application deployed and running for a quick test of all components. Everything worked perfectly - infact, Weblogic actually seems to run faster than it does on the Windows side - under the same hardware. On the whole, I also saw that the OS was consuming lesser memory helping programs overall. Ubuntu seems a really viable option for Java developers, and I would definitely recommend that you give some thought to this option, especially in your organization if you're a pure Java shop - lesser cost to maintain, and closer to your production environments. MS applications like Office have substitutes (OpenOffice, Evolution), but you can also use virtualization software to run these MS apps seamlessly on Ubuntu using something like QEmu. I really do think this has the potential to take off in many organizations.
PS: While I initially posted information about a 32bit Ubuntu install, I later went on and installed the 64bit version since my laptop has Intel Core2 chips. I was able to run all software I mentioned above and mostly also saw some performance improvement. The only glitch was that 2 of the MacOS options - the global menu and startup screens don't work or need to be compiled for a 64bit system. On the software side, Acrobat Reader couldn't be installed, however Ubuntu has pdf-reader preinstalled - so that's not something you'll miss.
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