Migrating from WinXP to Ubuntu 9.10

Finally!...I'm spending most of my time working in the Ubuntu half of my computer (multiboot). I gave up wishing the GUI networking stuff would work, and mounted my docs from the server using the command line; then automounted by editing /etc/fstab I had heard about this in my Linux group, but got the details by searching on the Internet.

I also have changed, mostly, the applications I use to those I can use in Ubuntu 9.10. There are still a couple of newsletters I am doing in Windows using Publisher, but almost everything else I can do in Linux. I've been working with Scribus to see if I can make a template for one of the newsletters (our computer user group NL), but since I'm learning it takes time. Not there yet.

For one important function, our donation tracking software which was getting old and no longer supported, we changed to a 'cloud' service for nonprofits-- Donor Tools / http://donortools.com DT was a 2008 startup; so they're new but have done a great job, with much more reasonable prices for nonprofits that anything else out there. They are very responsive to requests for support. We ran the aps side by side for a few months (updating data, learning the new one) and then switched to DT for all but our mailing list. Recently I switched that also...so now we are free! of that old ap.

By the way, the Donor Tools guy suggested using Google Chrome browser when I complained of slowness of his website, and I tried it. It is indeed faster than Firefox, and I can use it when I'm just updating the database; but it has no 'print preview' function, good grief...which is very necessary when doing web printing and wanting not to waste paper. So I use it part-time.

A real bear: learning to do mail merge in OpenOffice.org --holy cow! But I spent one w/e recently grinding away at it, and finally had success! I made myself a cheat sheet, because it is more complicated than MS Word, but I think I can reproduce my success next month. I can't make a claim to really understand databases and so forth, but I do need to use them to get my work done, so this was a big step forward.

I've found gNumeric is a helpful spreadsheet application. In fact I use it to do the cleanup of column headers my .csv files before opening them in OO Calc--many of the columns in the Donor Tools exported .csv files are more than one word--which seems to confuse the heck out of Calc. It takes each word as its own column, which leaves my data spread out in the wrong places and unusable.

The Gimp does a great job of photo editing...it just takes getting to know. And most of the things I do are the simple ones like cropping. It has far more capability than I will ever use.

Anyway, I'm having fun!