Ubuntu Saves the Day... Again!

This weekend when I booted up my aging Dell Latitude E7440 it was installing yet another Windows 10 update so I let it do its thing until it was ready to let me log in. Unfortunately, once I was able to log in, the system was running at a snail's pace and simple tasks were taking several seconds instead of instantaneously as they had just a day beforehand. So I thought I would try using System Restore to take it back to a restore point in late November when I know the system was running in its old perky self.

Unfortunately, the system started into a painful loop where it would keep rebooting and trying to repair itself until it came to a point where it said it could not repair. I tried booting it in Safe Mode and it would not even boot in Safe Mode. I was resigned to reinstalling Windows 10 on the system when I noticed I had an Ubuntu 18.04 boot flash drive here at home so I thought I could at least boot it up with it and copy over a few files on the local SSD I had not copied over to a cloud drive.

However, once the laptop booted up and it was back to working at full speed, I started to wonder why I even needed to reinstall Windows 10 on it at all. Since my laptop's SSD still had over 50GB of free disk space on it, I decided to set it up as a dual boot system and see if I could get by running Ubuntu on the system as my main OS and perhaps not reinstall Windows 10 on it at all. Before the pandemic my primary working workstation in my office was an Ubuntu system and my Windows 10 PC was only there for a few specific tasks I could only run under Windows. I could actually still remote into my office Windows system from here at home and run those few specific tasks remotely.

I noticed that installing a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 on my laptop from the flash drive took only a fraction of the time I had waited for the Windows 10 updates and then the failed System Restore that made my laptop unusable. Once the new Ubuntu was installed, I was happy to see my E7440 was able to connect just fine to the other two monitors attached to it previously (a Dell P2414hb and an ancient Samsung SyncMaster 910MP).

There were only a few essential applications I needed to install that were not standard on the Ubuntu distribution. I was happy to see they all worked flawlessly. The first mandatory app was Zoom (since everybody needs Zoom these days) and that installed without a hitch with just a few extra dependencies needed. I tested Zoom out Sunday morning with our church service and it worked just as well as the Windows version. I even hooked up our Samsung HDTV to the HDMI port so I could watch our worship service on the big screen and it worked perfectly. Before the service I even tried connecting to HBO Max using Firefox on my laptop and sending it to the HDTV and that works fine too. In an ideal world, I should be able to simply run a HBO Max app on our Roku stick, but as everybody with a Roku knows, HBO and Roku still do not have a deal to put HBO Max on Roku. (But that is another rant all together!)

I also installed Microsoft Teams and that seems to work fine, although I have not tested an actual Teams Meeting on it yet (old and new chat and Teams discussions all show up on it fine.) I also installed the Cisco AnyConnect client to connect to the university VPN and that seems to work well also. I was able to access printers and secured web services just like being on campus. For fun I even installed Microsoft Edge since I saw they had a Linux version now too. I can even earn my Microsoft Rewards Edge bonus on an Ubuntu system!

Another important application I needed was the BeyondTrust remote support representative console which I use to remotely control clients systems from home when they need assistance. Sure enough BeyondTrust has a Linux client I could download and which seems to open up and run. I will have to try it out the next time a client needs me to remote onto their system and help them out. I am guessing that will work okay when the time comes.

There is one very useful application that I cannot run under Ubuntu, however, and that is Box Drive. I can still access all my Box files using the browser interface, but Box Drive makes it so much easier to copy and access the files. I did look for an open source alternative and the only thing I could find was the rclone command line utility which I had tried before, but is really not at easy as Box Drive. I did find a paid product called ExpanDrive which allows you to use it free for 20 minute sessions before it disconnects you. That is actually all I need most of the time so I will try it out for now. Otherwise the university could probably shell out $49.95 so I can access all my files on Box. UPDATE (12/14/2020): My 7 day trial period expired and sure enough it still works, it just disconnects after 20 minutes. That works for me!

So now I am back up and working with my old Latitude but using Ubuntu 18.04 as my base operating system. Since we only have two more weeks of classes until I will be off for a few weeks, I will probably try to continue just using Ubuntu and see if I even need to reinstall Windows 10 on my laptop.





Location: 1 Brookings Dr, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA

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