Ubuntu and Mac OS X Living in Harmony

As web / Ruby on Rails developers, our computers become easily overwhelmed with all of the applications we may have up and running at any one time.  On a normal day, I will have the following running:

• Firefox with at least 10 tabs (a few tabs for our clients web sites in multiple environments, usually a tab or 2 with Google search results, our Redmine instance, GitHub, plus a couple other various sites that I peruse throughout the day)
• Several web apps using either Prism (Ubuntu) or Fluid (Mac) such as multiple Campfires, Google Reader, and Gmail.
• IM client
• Twitter client
• A Terminal window with several tabs to access multiple servers
• MySQL client
• PDF Reader
• Text editor / IDE (TextMate on a Mac or Geany on Ubuntu)
• Various other widgets such as a Remember The Milk widget, weather widget, system monitor, etc
• At least once a day I will have to open OpenOffice to open a document or spreadsheet

On top of these client apps, I will also have a Mongrel or Apache web server and a MySQL and/or SQLite3 database servers running.

Now that’s a lot of stuff!  If I did any design work (which I do not), I would have to add tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to this list which are VERY resource intensive.

Even with today’s high powered machines, that is asking an awful lot to expect a single computer to run all of this day in and day out without issues.  My 2 year old MacBook starts revving its engine preparing for takeoff after kicking off a couple mongrels, mysql, and a few FireFox tabs. 

My solution?  Share the load! 

How?  Synergy!

A little over a year ago, I purchased my wife a new laptop.  I took her desktop, which was still relatively new, and installed Ubuntu.  So now I have an Ubuntu desktop connected to a monitor on the right side of my desk with a keyboard and mouse that extend to my MacBook (via Synergy) that is placed in the center of my desk that extends to another external monitor on the right side of my desk. 

To get this configuration to work, I installed QuickSynergy on my Ubuntu machine and set it up as my Synergy “host” that has a single “client” called MacBook.  On my MacBook, I installed SynergyKM that connects to my Ubuntu as its host via the Ubuntu machine’s IP address. 

This has worked out great for me.  My Ubuntu machine runs my web and database servers which is nice.  Since the majority of our actual physical servers use Ubuntu, I can test configurations out on my desktop before trying them out on our test and production platforms.  With my Ubuntu machine taking the bulk of the backend server processing, my Mac is free to run client apps such as IM, Twitter, Firefox / Safari, iTunes, etc with little hastle. 

As an added bonus, I found this nice article a few months back that gives a step-by-step process to access a Windows partition from Ubuntu via VirtualBox.    With this, I can readily access Windows, Ubuntu, and Mac OS X operating systems with a single keyboard and mouse.  (I do try to limit the amount of time VirtualBox is running as it is VERY resource intensive and brings my Ubuntu machine to a crawl after a while.)

Isn’t technology great!!