Going Redmond Free
I wanted to write up something about my recent experiences of migrating my every day computing platform from Windows XP to Ubuntu.
Background:
I have been using Windows and Microsoft as my primary work PC software for years - in fact since before Windows 3.x. In my current computer(s) storage I have lots of tricky Excel spreadsheets with array formulas and multiple workbook/worksheet linkages, loads of images (not what you’re thinking BTW!) hundreds of Word documents, as well as PDF files and HTML files too.
Before I go too far, I should explain that I have also been using Linux for ages too. Using and developing server applications (mainly for the LAMP stack). I learnt most of what of I know about the OS by doing the fantastic Linux From Scratch, and subsequent Beyond Linux From Scratch, projects. In fact I still follow their mailing lists and contribute from time-to-time. So as a user of Linux I am happy to build source code, patch it, edit files by hand and use the command line, Bash especially. But, until recently, I had not found a total Linux “experience” which i felt would allow me to do everything I needed/wanted to happily. (Although that doesn’t mean I was happy with Windows most of the time, especially when it crashed or just hung for no reason…)
I had played with Ubuntu a few times and the recent releases looked very good indeed, so, last month I finally decided enough was enough. Time to go ‘Redmond free’.
Ubuntu installation:
My main PC is nothing special; a home built AMD 64 3200+ with 1G DDR RAM and a couple of Hard Disks (1 x 80G SATA II and 1 x 200G SATA I) and a DVD-RW and a DVD-RAM. Being used to Linux and partitions, the disks were heavily partitioned anyway so I just found a spare 6G slot and installed Ubuntu 7.0.4 from the Alternate CD (this gives you more control over how things are done IMHO and is faster as the UI is text based). I kept Windows where it was, on the first disk (/dev/sda on Linux), and installed Ubuntu on the 2nd drive in partition 11 (/dev/sdb12). As I already had grub installed on the 2nd drive I didn’t let Ubuntu over-write that. I just added a new section to the menu.lst file for my Ubuntu installation.
title Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty)
root (hd1,11)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb12 ro quiet splash
initrd /initrd.img
Email:
Because I like “clean” systems with minimal crud on them I did not get Ubuntu to copy over my Windows account and it’s data. I dealt with that manually. On my Windows system I was already using Mozilla’s Thunderbird for my mail/news/rss reader and Firefox as my main browser. So I just used the synaptic package manager to install Thunderbird and removed the default mail client which is Gnome’s Evolution. I also installed NTFS-3G - a userspace NTFS filesystem driver.
Now I could safely mount my Windows NTFS D: drive (where my Docs & Settings folder and all my data lives) in read/write mode. Using the initial command thunderbird -Profilemanager I told it the profile (along with all 12,000+ of my emails) location was on my old Windows partition. It worked flawlessly (and still is actually). It also found that the add-ons I had set-up in Windows, such as the Webmail extension for accessing Hotmail and Gmail accounts, were correctly identified too. I had to change the port settings to be above 1024 but this is well documented in the mailing lists etc. The neat thing about this solution by the way, is if I have to go back to Windows (for some weird reason) I can, and my all my email accounts and folders will still be active and up-to-date as both versions of Thunderbird are using the same store!
