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Confessions of a Guilty Pirate Wench
Hi, all!
I'm a girl. I'm a smarty-pants kind of girl, but still, a girl--so you people scare me a bit. I rock Windows as a sysadmin and software manager, but I HATED it. Also, I kept finding myself pirating stuff for the heck of it, or because it was cool. I kept WANTING to change, but not having any idea how to, or what programs could be used to substitute for my carefully-honed torrent-loving GUI. So, I'm going to post up what could best be described as a blog of my experiences shifting from pirate ware and MS Windows XP Pro over to Fedora/WINE and OSS software, as I've never seen anyone do so in even a REMOTELY user (chick) friendly way. My Light Side points will multiply, and I will become a Jedi Master over the next few weeks. So, here goes this padawan's first day canning all my crapware on my soon to be disabled and cannibalized Dell box, and trying out all the stuff I'm going to put on my monster nifty (Core 2 Quad, 4 GB RAM, dual 1TB SATAS, and a 512 Nvidia) system that's showing up next week. Please, feel free to drool. Also, to offer helpful advice. POST 1: The switchover from WinXP and pirated software to Linux and OSS I'm making me an honest woman. It's just too easy to pirate on an XP machine, and I categorically refuse to switch to Vista. Also, I don't want to get sued one day. So, I'm going to switch entirely over from pirated components to OSS or ware that I've actually purchased (gasp!) 7/03/08 (1) Getting rid of pirated Adobe CSS; switching to CutePDF. Possibly this means I need to DL Acrobat Reader. All I ever use Acrobat for is printing PDFs anyway. It'll probably make for a leaner cleaner box. Stupid Adobe site for making me run scripts from their page. I went to Demonoid to DL Adobe Reader instead of having to put up with the crap on their home page. (2) Finding an OSS alternative to Nero. Found one. Going with InfraRecorder. (3) Deep breath: switching from MS Office 2007 to OpenOffice. That's the real kicker, ain't it? This is the biggie. The monster. Must take yoga breaths and really think about what I need. I don't need MS Office to think. I write longhand when composing stuff or writing papers anyway. I don't really need anything but a way to type up papers with footnotes and errata, print them, mail them, PDF them, and have them be compatible with MS. I should donate to OpenOffice. (4) Switching from Outlook to Thunderbird. I need to send and receive emails, and sync tasks and calendar items to my PocketPC. I'd like to keep my PhatNotes, but it occurs to me that it might be pirated too. I'd rather make a clean sweep of it. (5) Find a way to sync. I'm thinking BirdieSync or something. (6) Switching from Dreamweaver over to a free HTML editor (here's where that guilt was kicking in--I shouldn't be using an expensive product like Dreamweaver w/out paying for it, much less making money off of it. Switching to NVU, an OSS alternative that's cross-platform. I'm trying to go with cross-platform alternatives whenever possible so it's an easy shift over to Fedora next week. (7) Just got rid of DietPower 4.0. It was only depressing me to have it around anyway. (8) Just canned EndNote, Finale, Daemon Tools (won't need it if not mounting disks anymore), Nero 7, PG Music, Maple 10.0, Teach Me Piano Deluxe, eMule (thank god I won't need that anymore), OMG--I can finally trash Windows Desktop Search!! Wahoo! I won't need it for Outlook anymore! Got rid of Advanced Business Card Maker 3, (most of this crap I never installed anyway, just collected it like a magpie.), RealizeVoice, SoThink, SigmaPlot 9.0, (I can do all these stats and stuff in Java anyway), Swift 3D (9) Things I need to buy because I can't live without them: a. Aquarius Alarm Clock b. Possibly Personal Brain. I love it SOOO much. (10) Switching from Easy CD/DA Encoder to Multifrontend. (11) Switching from Tag & Rename to massid3lib. (12) Removed Mathematica 6. I used to have the license for it but not anymore. Besides, if I can't do it in Java, I probably don't understand the math well enough to be using it anyway. (13) I guess I'll get rid of Rosetta Stone too. I don't use it enough anyway, and if I want to learn a language, I'll pay for it or get an academic license. (14) Yeah, I'm getting rid of Dragon Naturally Speaking, too. It's like going through your closet and getting rid of any shoes or sweaters you haven't worn in over a year. It's painful, but also liberating! (15) Ok, it looks like Thunderbird isn't the right app for me. It seems to be a substitute for Outlook Express, not for Outlook. It looks like what I actually want is Kontact, and I won't get that until I start up with Linux. Fortunately, it seems that others aren't having too many problems syncing their WM devices on that platform. I'll trash Thunderbird and just wait until I get my new monster box and put Linux on it next week to get rid of Outlook completely. (16) Some concerns: I hear that iTunes works fine on Fedora, which is good. I can't live without my iPod. Nobody's cracked an iPhone for Linux yet, or so Google tells me; I'll just stick with my trusty WM 5.0 device for now and upgrade when it finally breaks or I throw it through a wall. I would TOTALLY love to get an iPhone though. (17) Damn. I REALLY like PhatNotes, but it doesn't look like there's any support for it on a Linux platform. PhatNotes, Aquarius Alarm Clock, and TimeLeft are the only three programs I'd actually PAY for, they're so good, but I don't think I can get PhatNotes to run on Fedora, even with WINE. I checked their AppDB, and there's no entry. The real concern isn't that it won't work in a Linux environment, but that it won't sync with Kontact. For now, I'll port my notes over to Outlook and Xfer the whole mess from Outlook over to Kontact. If PhatNotes works with Fedora, fine, I'll buy it, but not unless. Same for Aquarius. I actually own TimeLeft, so I'll give that a shot too. (18) AWESOME! I can finally get rid of QuickTime! Stupid parallel installation with iTunes. I hate that thing; it's always trying to get back in the running executables every time iTunes updates. I only ever use VLC Media Player anyway; it works perfectly respectably and doesn't lock my box up. (19) My favorite nifty tool so far is ODF Converter-Integrator. It's an executable that, once installed, jumps right in each time I double- click an Office XML file, like buggerBillGates.docx. It pops it right open in OpenOffice Writer. That's the handiest damn thing EVAH. |
Welcome, and it's good to see that you've seen the light. Indeed, in a way Window$ encourages piracy, because everything costs so damn much and does so damn little. I think a default Window$ install is absolutely useless, I mean nothing works out of the box, dunno about Vi$ta, I never installed it.
As for the programs you listed, I haven't heard of most of them and don't really know what they're supposed to do. Here are some programs that I like: - xpdf for pdfs, maybe kpdf if you want it to copy and paste text more easily. - k3b works well as a replacement for Nero (there is a Nero for Linux too), but I usually use the command line tools 'growisofs' and 'cdrecord' - openoffice kinds sucks (bloated, slow, buggy in most cases), IMO, but as there are few alternatives. For sure I'd recommend gnumeric as a replacement for excel, it's much better and more accurate. - have you tried 'rsync' for syncing ? - nvu is indeed a good web authoring program - for a media player, I recommend mplayer, but also use xine for streams Other than that I don't know what might be what you're looking for. But, I can say that some of the most powerful apps you will find for Linux will be command line tools. You can do a lot more with the command line versions of programs than with the GUI, because it's usually impossible to make a GUI to include all possible options for a program. Most of the time GUIs are just frontends for command line utilities such as k3b is. k3b doesn't do much itself it uses 'growisofs', 'cdrecord' and other command line tools to get things done. And of course, not all command line options are available in the gui. It's probably too advanced and scary for most newcomers, but eventually you should try to learn it if you lack power. There are many tutorials on the net, you can also look at the links in my sig. Since you mentioned you have a powerful rig, here's mine: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9300 @ 2.50GHz (this is one of the new 45nm processors, but it only has 6 MB of L2 cache) 1333 MHz FSB 2 GB dual channel DDR2 Corsair 800 MHz RAM at CL4 (but currently running at CL5 for stability reasons) GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB DDR3 160 GB Seagate SATA II (I don't need any more than this, in fact it's too big) (and I was thinking of getting 2 x 80 GB ones and making a RAID 0, but after much reading and thinking, it's just not worth it, my data is more valuable than is worth the performance) It's not the best of the best, but the best of the best costs too much for me :) |
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Oh, and as you probably should already know many Window$ programs will work through wine, even many games do and quite well too. Still, I would recommend using native linux programs over running things through wine, but if you really need a program, try using wine.
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Creating pdf files is a breeze; you don't need cutePDF or anything. Just about every distro already comes with a "print to pdf" virtual printer set up for you. So just create the document in openoffice or whatever and print it straight to a file. And as mentioned above, you can use kpdf, xpdf or others for viewing. About the only thing Linux lacks in this area are good applications for advanced pdf editing, but you can run Acrobat under wine or CrossWeavers office.
Instead of multifrontend, go with grip or kaudiocreator (depending on whether you go with a gnome or kde desktop). They're native Linux frontends for multiple audio encoders. I personally use kaudiocreator because it has the most flexibility in editing the metadata (id3) tags before encoding, but you can also use easytag, audiotagtools, or several others to edit them afterwards. For unusual audio formats or for batch-encoding, it's very easy to use commandline multimedia programs like mencoder or ffmpeg to convert formats. They're really easy to use and very powerful once you know the command syntax. Finally, most cd burning programs can easily create disk images instead of burning to a physical disk. There are several "alarm clock" options available too. I have used kalarm a few times, and with a little scripting work it's probably capable of doing anything Aquarius alarm clock can. In any case, it wouldn't be difficult to manually set up a cron-type command that would function the same way. There are a lot of other options out there for substituting Windows functions. But you often have to look around a bit, and things might not be as "user friendly" as on Windows. Here's one pretty good list of equivalents. More generally, I've found that it's often difficult to stay with one tool only, because they often have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, I usually use xine for video playback, but some formats don't play well (or at all) in it, and I have to switch to mplayer or vlc. I also use the mplayer plugin for online media. Take your time to learn what's available, but if I can give some general advice, try to stop thinking in "Windows" mode. If you go into Linux thinking of it as nothing but a substitute for Windows, you're bound to be frustrated. Instead, understand that it's a powerful, but quite different, OS, with it's own strengths and weaknesses. Start learning to understand the "Linux" way of doing things. I've personally found that it sometimes (well, often ;)) takes more work, research, and trial and error, to do what I want in Linux, but in the end I can usually achieve my goals. And in doing so I often find it's more satisfying in the end precisely because I had to actually learn the inner workings of what I was doing, instead of just playing around with somebody else's automated tools. |
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For statistics and graphing, have a look at R.
For paper writing and references, have a look at Lyx and Bibliotex. |
How did you get DietPower 4.0?
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You made me laugh too. Welcome to LQ! Quote:
http://lifehacker.com/388785/sync-yo...essly-in-linux I found iTunes to be very annoying (but, in fairness, I used it only once). Amarok, well, rocks. And before you ask, no, it is my music, legally purchased with real money that was was mine after I was paid for a real job and had paid real taxes. |
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Firstly, there are no women on the internet - FACT! And secondly, a switch over looks like a success story to me, so away this goes to the Success Story forum.
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Oh, and another thing, I keep reading the title as "Confessions of a Guilty Pirate Wrench" and become confused.
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7/04/08
(1) I can finally get rid of stupid Windows Media Player. I only play stuff in VLC Media Player, iTunes, or yPlay anyway. OMFG do they ever make it hard to uninstall WMP. I had version 11 on my box, and they're all "Are you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY sure you want to do this?" And I'm thinking, "the more you ask me, the more I want to sponsor an XP-install CD-burning a la Berlin circa 1938 in an Indiana Jones movie. (2) There's something else here too: I can apparently now trash the WMP Runtime, which is nice. Less crap. Always good. (3) Huh. YPops appears to be a handy dandy tool to use to forward my Yahoo mail to Outlook 2007. I hope it works in Fedora, too. (4) I love WebShots desktop rotating wallpaper. I hope it works in Fedora. I saw that in the AppDB for WINE that some people had gotten it working. I can't live without my running slide show of Boromir and Prince Caspian. (5) EEEEEVil. You actually CAN'T uninstall Windows Media Player 10. I can't wait to have a nice clean new machine. (6) So I torrented the LiveDisk of Fedora 9. I'm checking out the KDesktop version first, because I want to use Kontact, which is apparently the Outlook of Linux, and comes in the KDE package (which I don't understand what that means, but I'm assuming I'll get the idea). I know I can use a live disk to boot from to get the feel of what's going on in my nifty new choice of OS. I'm using it on my current machine b/c I can thrash this one now with no real worries. I'll never have to rebuild Windows again!! Nor me nor none of my folks! (7) Ok, that was a bust. The disk booted, but it just sat there and said "ready". No GUI came up. WTF? There's no readme with the LiveDisk either. Back to Google. What the devil is the El Torito specification? Ok, the Fedora site has a howto for live cds, but there's nothing there but total gibberish about the command line. Where's a simple FAQ for what might go wrong when trying to use the live cd? Ah. Under the readme. Well, they COULD make it easier to find. Apparently, it takes a long time to boot from the CD. I'll just retry the boot disk, and let it sit for a few minutes. (8) Dang. Neither the KDE or the Fedora Desktop live cds will boot. I don't know why. I'd really like to try Fedora out before I go and install it as my chosen OS. |
Also--sorry for those who are viewing this; someone seems to have moved my thread to the wrong forum category. This ain't no success story yet.
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I wasn't aware you could uninstall WMP... I thought it would be like I.E. Microsoft could claim that "WMP is Windows."
I'm not sure if you're reading the replies here, but if this is going to be more like a blog, why not just get a blog? Forums are for... well... having a forum - an assembly where people can meet and discuss things. There are plenty of free blogspaces such as Blogspot, Wordpress and many more. But in either event, I would hope you're reading replies. Some of them can be quite useful. I haven't used Fedora Core since version 5, but if you're using a USB keyboard, try holding down shift. Later when you install FC9 on your hard drive, you can edit /boot/grub/grub.conf with edd="skipmbr" in the kernel line. Source: Fedora Project Seeing as how you'll be using fedora, I'd like to point out some resources I used back when I was trucking it: I was trying to look for http://stanton-finley.net, but it seems as though that site is no longer available. Which is a shame because it was a great installation guide, I thought. |
I have several blogs. The general idea was to give others who are thinking about the same choice as I've made to read about the experience of someone who's actually doing it. In addition, I wanted the ideas of this community to get some new perspectives on OSS. I've already tried out a couple of the ideas that these folks have proposed. In addition, posting here gives people the chance to find this thread, and compare their OSS choices to mine, as opposed to howling in the cyberwilderness. As of right now, I'm stuck trying to figure out why the Fedora live cds won't boot on my machine. I've already googled the Fedora FAQs and the forum; they are hopelessly technical and rely on someone already knowing command-line. They also seem to assume that people using Fedora or installing it for the first time are switching from one brand of Linux to another, and WANT to know all the technical stuff. I want a GUI, man.
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When you d/l a Linux distro liveCD or liveDVD, it should become standart practice to run md5sum on the .iso when download is complete, and compare that md5sum to the md5sum at the website from which you downloaded the .iso. If the md5sums are different, you have a corrupted download.
If you are having problems with Fedora, there are many other liveCD distros you could try. Go to distrowatch.com. Click on the Search word in the banner. Scroll down a bit, and in the Category drop-down list box, choose liveCD. In the resultant screen, scroll down for a list of liveCD/DVD distros you can try. Alternative to Fedora (rpm based distros - .rpm is the package format in case you didn't know): CentOS (RedHat Enterprise without the cost of buying RHE), Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, and openSUSE. There are other good distros, which use other package formats, such as Debian-based distros (Knoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu). And you could also try source-code based distros, chief among them are Linux From Scratch and Slackware. As a sys-admin type, there are several distros devoted to system forensics, intrusion detection, etc. that might interest you. For teaching/learning purposes, there is Damn Vulnerable Linux, which is purposely crippled in many ways. Your job is to find and fix the problems. In summation, GNU/Linux is all about choice. There are many choices available. You can choose to compile from source code or choose pre-compiled packages for your distro of choice. There are even tools to install packages made for one format o system which uses another format (alien, checkinstall, and encap come to mind). Enjoy the journey into GNU/Linux. |
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Chief among the source based distros are LFS, Gentoo and Source mage to name a few. About Slack's package management: http://slacksite.com/slackware/packages.html |
I don't know what hardware you are trying the liveCD with, but sound like a bad burn. The live Fedora CD should go right to a selection menu. I've had similar results from a bad burn.
Bob |
Thanks for the tips on the bad burn. I'm going to try to reburn the live disk with more buffer and at a slower speed to see what happens.
While I'm at it; I've searched the site to find out more about switching my mobile OS or possibly purchasing a new phone to match my new configuration. Right now, I have a T-Mobile MDA running Windows Mobile 5. As I'll be moving to Kontact, I'd like to know what other phones people have used to sync with Kontact? Things I absolutely HAVE to have on my mobile unit: (1) Contacts, calendar, notes, email, tasks (Outlook/Kontact stuff) (2) texting (3) IMing (4) an ebook reader (5) a PDF reader (6) a weather application (7) an internet browser (8) a camera (9) a calculator (10) access to my OpenOffice documents (11) GoogleMaps (12) a terminal or capacity to PUTTY into my home server (13) voice commands (14) a media player for audio and video My current phone has all this stuff, and the ability to download and install programs remotely over the internet. What phones can I do this with in Fedora/Kontact? |
Whao, that was some big-time changing. You say you're a wench but that's serious girlie downsizing. Like kicking off the Jimmy Choo's and stuffing your feet into something from WalMart.
(Only guessin, by the way; I'm assuming you're from a land where the WalMart reference will have some relevance.) It's a shot in the dark, but anyway... ...mighty glad you've make the move. And it sounds as though you were deeper into Windows than I ever was. What's this Diet stuff for example? And EndNote, Finale, PG Music, and Teach Me Piano Deluxe? Low on calories, but big on music, by the sound of it. It would appear you've been trying to ditch Windows apps and replace them with OSS alternatives one by one but still keeping the original XP core...before moving on to your new "monster" rig. As you're a sysadmin, who presumably knows how to swap/add HDs etc, why don't you just leave XP virgo intacto on one drive, install Linux (with all the onboard apps + repos) on another hard drive and see which you like best? As bigrig says, by the way, you don't have to get stuck on fedora. There are loads of alternatives. I love ubuntu, but I'm forever changing distros on my spare machines. And fedora's good, but so's Puppy, Mandriva and a whole load of others. If the burning's not working out, try another distro - and make extra sure you're burning to a CD-R disc. A lot of distros/drives don't like anything else, as I've found out many times when I've stuck in a blank without looking. But, Regina (yep, I understand Latin), keep unadulterated XP on one drive/partition and install Linux on another, scour the repos for everything extra you need and then decide which you like best. Almost everything will work in Linux. My Nokia talks to my PC via bluetooth, for example; my mp3 player hooks up no problem; OpenOffice and Microsoft Office are totally interchangeable, and so on. Once you've done a real-life evaluation of XP -v- Linux, I'm sure you'll toss the parrot from your shoulder, tear off the eye-patch and walk the plank to a better world. |
I'm really enjoying this thread, having stumbled-upon it.
Keep workin' it, keep writing your experiences the way you do. Lots of gals and guys are out there trying to do what you're doing, or at least they're thinking about it. It's g-r-e-a-t that you're plunging in ... and writing very, very well about it. |
Yep Regina, keep up the good work. I'm sure it will be a success eventually.
Incidentally, here's a good MS v Linux comparison: http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm. Just a short read, but nicely explains that a (slightly) different mindset is needed for Linux. Also, a good list (here at LQ) of MS equiv apps on Linux: http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/...ndows_software HTH & welcome to LQ :) |
Any opinions out there on KDE working better with Ubuntu or Fedora? I should tell you; though I want all my nifty goodies and syncing to boot, what I actually USE my machine for is hardcore Java programming, with a possible future second purpose of database management.
Also, somebody PLEEZ tell me that Assassin's Creed works with WINE or whatever; their AppDB is unclear about what I have to do to get it working. The whole point of my box upgrade is so I can run stuff faster (and that means my nifty games, kiddies!!). Thanks for the encouragement, Red John!! |
Hi, I'm not a huge WINE fan and if I need to use Windows stuff I head into VirtualBox, an excellent emulator.
Like you, I jumped ship from Windows to Linux. The clincher for me was that loads of software I'd paid for (that's, like, bought with my money stopped working when I upgraded to Vista. Microsoft can talk as much as they like about compatibility wizards and so on, but the basic fact is that they don't work. Hardly any of my games I enjoyed on XP would work on Vista. That was bad enough, but nor would a lot of my important productivity apps, like the hugely expensive SPSS (a stats program), Quark XPress (page design software important in my working-from-home job) and the Pinnacle DV editing suite. I hadn't pirated this stuff. I owned it. But Vista's compatibility wizard said No. I have found FOSS alternatives for some software (R is a reasonable replacement for SPSS, for example), but the time lost in having to learn new progs which may or may not be viable workplace alternatives is a pain. Scribus, for example, is nowhere near to the Quark standard, although it's excellent for those without precision demands. Gimp, however, betters Photoshop in many ways. The way round it is to use something like VirtualBox (plenty of alternatives out there), to create a virtual windows environment that allows you to run all your "can't-do-without" stuff. It's a compromise but what the heck. I've got SPSS and Quark XPress running again. Virtual solutions, though, are not so brilliant on games, where the graphics issue comes into play. It's there that you're relying on wine and hoping that someone values the game highly enough to make it work. But even if a game doesn't work in wine, don't blame Linux. I bought an apparently brilliant game called Fahrenheit (if you're in the US I think it's called Indigo-something-or-other), which won't run on any of my machines. I despise Atari for selling a game that doesn't work on Vista and requires a patch to make it run on XP - which it doesn't anyway. I've tried every possible configuration (memory, processor, graphics) and it'll still install but not run. Games are always a bit freaky on PCs, but IMHO Atari are scum for selling this. And no, I can't get it to run in wine. Apologies, I'm getting sidetracked. You can run all your crucial Windows apps in VirtualBox if they're indispensable but wine is probably a better bet for games. I'd be surprised if as popular a game as Assassin's Creed isn't well supported by now. Keep goin' girl, you're nearly there. And steer clear of anything from Atari! |
My peeps use R, though I generally figure that if I can't do the stats by hand (or in Java), I probably don't understand it well enough to publish on the results anyway.
I've used SPSS before, but since they went to v. 14 I haven't been as thrilled with the interface. Here's a more important question: does anyone have an opinion on how well Mathematica works in, say, Ubuntu? I always screw up my integrals, so it's easier to do in an M notebook. |
VirtualBox is good. Also check out Cedega (never used it, heard it was good).
Nice computer you got there, but I'll stick with mine ;-D Specs below. Haven't updated drive capacity yet. Got 3 SCSI drives on the way. It was build to be a server. The RAM costs $600 - $1200 a piece, thank God I didn't pay for it :D BTW - Not saying mine's faster by any means, but it has more sentimental value for me as well. lol |
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Assassin's creed does seem to "work" through wine if you're lucky:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...sion&iId=11069 But I think it's just another crappy ubisoft game, they used to make good games but not anymore :( |
Pointing to a replacement is really tough. I would recommend you do a short google search for each application just "[app name] replacement linux", and if you don't come up with anything, just start a thread for each individual app in the software forum.
For example Dreamweaver is the top of the line web authoring program. Even if you don't even need the WYSIWYG part - the features in the code view alone dwarf the features of the linux equivalents. But it depends on what you need. For my needs bluefish is even more suited because I don't need most of the features Dreamweaver offers (the code completion would be nice though). If you write full scores - there is nothing that comes close to Finale, and I've given the open-source alternatives a real chance. But again, you might just find something that does the job for you. But without knowing what you want to accomplish it is really hard to make recommendations. Fedora is also kind of a tough starting point. I like Fedora, but the latest version is too cutting edge for me. I spend too much time ironing out bugs. Also most documentation will probably more technical than you care for. I think Ubuntu is a good failsafe suggestion that nobody will flame me for. (notice that I'm not even a ubuntu user :)) |
That was one of the first moments of clarity for me when I switched. The realization of all the needless garbage I had installed on my system; all of which was pirated. I did the math and found out I had about $13,000 worth of software sitting on my system that I was never going to use, including the operating system.
I think you'll enjoy using something like NVU or Kompozer, it has a great CSS editor built in and we use it here at work instead of DreamweaverMX (plus a couple hundred dollars in upgrades to 8 or CS3 for decent CSS support) for our humble little site. Also check out Quanta+, I whole heartedly recommend that proggy for everything web-design based. Sorry, can't help it, my deal is about promoting Linux for creativity and design. I think it's severely overlooked by people who don't want to take their time to learn about the actual SOFTWARE that makes the Linux desktop so great. And yes, you can in fact have cmyk support for graphics and open Photoshop files in GIMP. Those are lame excuses if you really take the time to look into it and find there are native solutions available. |
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HEY! I've installed Ubuntu on my old PC, and am EVEN NOW writing this post from my heretofore useless old box. I'm trying it out before going full-on with my nifty new machine. Queries: I think I'll be fine with Kontact, and most of the other stuff is going to work well (holy crap! It took me all of 50 minutes to install Ubuntu, all the apps I wanted, and all the updates! This distro ROCKS HARD). What I need to know is what music player can be used to mimic the functionality of iTunes + iPod? I'm not an Apple fan, but I DO like my iPod. I don't mind hacking it if I have to, but I'd rather not. Also, I would REALLY like to be able to import my playlists from iTunes, as I've got several hundred of them, all very specifically organized (I listen to a LOT of opera, each of which has a separate playlist, etc). Suggestions? I'm going to try them out on this machine before messing with my pretty, pretty megabox. Regina |
I don't have an ipod, but:
apt-cache search ipod apt-cache show hipo Although I don't use an ipod myself, I can say that you'll have no reason to ever hack it. (But you're welcome to try your hand at reverse-engineering the protocols between ipod and the Apple software.) |
Most of the linux music managers can handle an ipod. If you just connect it to the machine in ubuntu, I think it should start up rhythmbox. - if not, it's in apps-media
I've had better experience with Amarok though. But even Banshee can do it, and Listen (one-man-project - my player of choice) has ipod handling announced for the next version. When they give you trouble, try gtkpod. It's slightly more technical to set up, but it seems to have a higher success rate. If you don't mind "hacking" it - you might want to take a look at rockbox and see if your model is compatible. http://www.rockbox.org/ |
Ok, awesome on the iPod responses. That should work.
Here's another question: I have dual hard drives in my megabox (the one I'm biting my nails over going all the way Linux on). They're FAT32 formatted SATA drives. If I copy all my data (music, documents, etc, etc) over to my secondary HD and format my primary HD with Ubuntu, can I still access my data on my secondary HD? On my other older machine, Ubuntu recognized the other HD, no problem (both SATA drives in that one too). Has anyone had any problems doing this? Ooo--also, I'm seeding some stuff in my bittorrent client (Vuze); does anyone think I'll have a problem using Transmission to find, check, and continue seeding those torrents? |
Ok, I figured out the drives thing (it was NTFS formatted, so I had to install some stuff on my old machine, and I got it working fine).
Everybody mentally hold my hand; I'm backing up everything right now to my secondary drive (and all docs and work etc to an external USB HD). Phew! Taking the plunge! Will report back when I've officially gone Linux! |
Vuze was formally Azureus, which was cross-platform. I never liked it on any system, but it should be available for linux.
I think you should be able to continue it with transmission if you start the torrent and copy the downloaded files to Transmissions download folder, too. |
Ah--I think one final question.
I'm ready to install Ubuntu to my main hard drive. Here's my problem: I have two 750GB SATA drives; one contains all my backed up data, the other is the master drive with the WinXP installation and data. I can't tell the difference between the two drives when I'm trying to install Ubuntu from the live disk. I'm not given the option (possibly because the drives are NTFS formatted) to utilize part of the space on a given drive (cuz then I could tell which drive was which by how much data was on a given drive); I'm only able to do a full install on a disk, formatting and rewriting it completely. How do I tell which one is which? They're sda and sdb (theoretically, sda should be the master drive that I want to install to, but I can't tell). I used the fdisk command to get the drive identification numbers for each one, but in the partitioning portion of the installation, it doesn't include that identification number to tell the difference between the two, and since they're both identical manufactures (Western Digital 750GB SATA, etc), I'm afraid of simply assuming that sda is the correct drive to install Ubuntu to. What do I do? |
Look at the drives contents on the ubuntu livecd.
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I already did. The problem is that I can't tell which drive is which in the partition manager. When I look at the contents of the drives in the live cd, they're labeled "Hard Drive" and "Hard Drive_".
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Try umount /dev/hda && umount /dev/hdb && mkdir /media/OS && mkdir /media/DATA && mount /dev/hda /media/OS && mount /dev/hdb /media/DATA
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Quote:
Note: This was done entirely from the Ubuntu Live CD. Posting, images, editing, everything. Disclaimer: DO NOT REBOOT BEFORE INSTALLING. Devices *could* change names after a reboot. Make sure you know which drive you want before letting it overwrite it. Screenshots of process http://img129.imageshack.us/my.php?i...htdisk1vr3.jpg http://img98.imageshack.us/my.php?im...htdisk2dg1.jpg 1. From the taskbar: Places -> Computer 2. Double-click one of the drives you wish to check. In this case, you'll likely have two that seem to be "Hard Drive". (I had some showing "Local Disk", neither was a system drive, but I used them for illustration) If this is the drive you want to install Ubuntu to, continue to the next step, else hit Back and try another disk until you find the drive you want. 3. Once you've found the appropriate drive, right-click on any file or directory in the right-hand pane. Select properties. Note the line labeled "Location:". This is the mountpoint this drive, write it down. If you wrote it down, you can close the file browser window now. 4. From the taskbar: System -> Administration -> Partition editor 5. Check the "Mountpoint" column for the mountpoint you wrote down in step 3. If you don't see it, choose a different device from the drop-down box in the top-right. Change devices until you find the one that has your mountpoint on it. 6. When you've found the device with your mountpoint, write it down. i.e. If your mountpoint is "/media/mymountpoint" and you see that on the line starting with "/dev/sdb6", you would write down "sdb" If it was on the line with "/dev/hda1" you would write down "hda" The three letters after "/dev/" is the current name of that drive. You can see it at the top of the window if you're on the correct screen and in the selection box in the top-right also. Once you've written it down, you can close the partition editor. DO NOT REBOOT BEFORE STARTING THE INSTALL. Device names *could* change. 7. Begin the install from the desktop icon. When you reach the partitioning screen, you can now select the appropriate drive. 8. Post to LQ. ;x Lenard p.s. this issue is frequent enough, anyone who wishes to hack the instructions/images into a faq or elsewhere, be my guest |
Thank you very much, DoomOr, but by the time I saw your post, I had already cracked the box, unplugged the backup harddrive, and installed Ubuntu as a clean full-disk partition on the master drive (I was being paranoid, but hey--once the install was complete, I re-cracked, plugged it back in, and now I have my nifty backup HD working like a champ and all my data is secure, so, good on me.)
I DID IT!! ;-) Windows is GONE 4EVA!! In celebration, I had bought a geek tee off of thinkgeek.com. I am now officially wearing a blue chick Tux t-shirt!! Ok, onward with the migration issues. Both Banshee and Rhythmbox seem like they'll work with my iPod. Here's my problem: I have hundreds of playlists from iTunes. I have HUNDREDS of operas along with all my other music in a big folder that contains subfolders of artists. In those artist folders, especially in the opera composers--Donizetti, Mozart, etc--there are subfolders of the operas themselves. My opera playlists in iTunes had identical names to the folders themselves, i.e. "Opera-L'Elisir d'Amore (Donizetti) Callas Soprano 1960". Another playlist might be named "Concerto-Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat major (Tchaikovsky) Cliburn Pianist 1971" which would be also the name of a subfolder in the "Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich" folder. Get the idea? In iTunes, each of the playlists pointed to the relevant folder containing the music. I have the entire big music folder containing the artists with its directory substructure unchanged, and the exported iTunes library (in whatever format it was exported in, probably XML). Though I can import a single playlist at a time in banshee, I can't figure out how to import my iTunes library containing all my playlists. I'm fine on using whatever player that works; any ideas? Or scripts? Or suggestions? |
Also, I have another problem. I'm trying to import my contacts, notes, and calendar into Kontact. I have the data from Thunderbird (I imported my contacts, notes, and calendar into Thunderbird before getting rid of Windows, since apparently there's no way to do so with an Outlook file). So I have a Thunderbird addressbook called "addressbook.db", and a set of notes called "note.msg". I imported the calendar fine, .ics was recognized as a file format for a calendar by Kontact, so that's done. There doesn't seem to be an import function for the notes at all, though. How do I do that? Most importantly, how do I get the Thunderbird addressbook.db into my Kontact?
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http://jajoma.blogspot.com/2005/01/h...underbird.html - may help. Apparently it works both ways....
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Ah, apologies. It seems that you can export address books from Thunderbird in .csv format (if you have multiple address books you'll need to export each book individually), Kontact can then import the .csv file (remember to select Contacts first).
http://email.about.com/od/mozillatips/qt/et082504.htm for the exporting and use File > Import > Import CSV List to import. On Kontact, it doesn't look as though there is a way to import Notes - you could try a copy/paste job or, I'm afraid, you may just have to manually retype them. |
[Loud_thought]
I wonder how long this thread would have been if a dude had posted it.... [/Loud_thought] :p |
I don't see that it would have been particularly different. Regina has asked a lot of questions to ensure that she has a painless switch - the converse of that would have been a post entitled "Linux Sux!" because she hadn't researched beforehand :) Tchoh, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Anyway, there are no girls on the internet. Didn't you get the memo? |
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