July 1st, 2007

30 days with ubuntu. - Part 3 of 4.

Click 1 or 2 to see my pre­vi­ous entries.

Week Three

I don’t have any free­lance work this week, so I decided to shut down the iMac and see how I held up. I exported all my Aper­ture photos (just for the sake of putting F-Spot through it’s paces, I will never aban­don Aper­ture for my RAW pho­tog­ra­phy needs), iTunes music, e-mail, and what­not and wanted to see if, on a day-to-day basis, Ubuntu would hold up.

I didn’t miss a beat with music or video. Exaile or Rhythm­box both are great, simple music play­ers that don’t suck up resources, and hide away when not in use. Exaile is more robust in it’s abil­ity to look up lyrics, album covers, and even wikipedia entries for artists you’re lis­ten­ing to, but so far I haven’t picked a winner between that and the tried-and-true iTunes style inter­face of Rhythm­box, which is simple, clean, and effec­tive. I’ve got about 5 gigs of music on here that i’ve been swap­ping to and from the firewire drive with all my iTunes library on it. The one com­plaint is actu­ally Apple’s fault, but is some­thing that would make my life even easier - with iTunes 7, Apple ‘broke’ (read: closed off) 3rd party DAAP shar­ing over a local net­work. In other words, I can browse to, and find, my shared music on my iMac … but I’m not allowed to listen to it. Hope­fully Apple wises up and works with open stan­dards (as they love to claim), or some­one reverse-​engineers a way to listen to shared music.

iPod sup­port is great - plug it in, and bam - it shows up in Rhythm­box instantly. You can only man­u­ally manage the iPod, as in drag­ging music to and from the player. But still, really nice that it works out of the box like that.

For my video needs, I use VLC, much like I do on the Mac. Noth­ing new here. It basi­cally plays every format of video you can throw at it, no ques­tions asked. I also have Democ­racy Player installed, which allows me to sub­scribe to video pod­casts and such. Since Ubuntu is based on free soft­ware and is intended for world­wide audi­ences, they cannot include the DVD play­back for restricted for­mats by default. But it’s an easy fix. Open your ter­mi­nal and type:

$gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

add the fol­low­ing lines and then save:

## Medibuntu - Ubuntu 7.04 "feisty fawn"
## Please report any bug on https://launchpad.net/products/medibuntu/+bugs
deb http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ feisty free non-free
deb-src http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ feisty free non-free

import the gpg key so the soft­ware updater can authen­ti­cate with the server:

wget -q http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

update your sources:

sudo apt-get update

and then install the codecs:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs

Voila!

Send­ing and receiv­ing email couldn’t’ be a whole lot easier, as I pri­mar­ily use Gmail. I exported my 6000+ emails from my iMac, again, just to see how Evo­lu­tion (a la MS Out­look) or Mozilla Thun­der­bird would hold up on here. I don’t really have any inten­tion of using it as my day-to-day email/calendar/contacts pro­gram - I actu­ally set up Gmail as my default mail client, despite the fact I dumped a bunch of email on here. Evo­lu­tion was snappy, and has a pretty clean and easy to under­stand inter­face. Very sim­i­larly to Out­look, there are panes on the left-​hand side that out­line basic tasks - Mail, Con­tacts, Cal­en­dar, Memos, and Tasks. I imported my con­tacts into Evo­lu­tion as well, and it has a very sim­i­lar … I might even say “inspired” Out­look appear­ance in almost every way. Not that imi­ta­tion is a bad thing in this instance. Users, espe­cially ones who are switch­ing from Win­dows or the Mac - need as few bar­ri­ers as pos­si­ble to using new soft­ware, despite poten­tially unfa­mil­iar names of the software.

Beagle was able to search the email quickly and thor­oughly, along with my con­tacts. Press­ing F12 brings up beagle search dialog, and lets you search all the data one could pos­si­bly want access to - emails, con­tacts, book­marks, videos, music, and much more.

I did hit a snag with photos, and I’m still trying to get this one solved. For the sake of seeing how F-Spot would handle my pic­tures, I exported my photos from Aper­ture in JPEG format, and tried to import them. As soon as I began to bring them all in, the pro­gram slowed down and chugged until I got an error mes­sage, telling me I was ‘out of memory’. I’ve looked into this, and it’s a bug in libexif, the open source library that han­dles EXIF data import­ing. Some part of the data Aper­ture puts into the photos makes any photo app (not just F-Spot) choke when trying to load the files. Appar­ently, the next release of this library has fixed this bug and should get me well on my way. I have, how­ever, imported photos from my SD1000 & my Rebel XT, and it works great. F-Spot is very sim­i­lar to iPhoto, and is a rel­a­tively new project, so it should only improve over time. I’m excited to see what hap­pens with libexif, so I can really put the app thru it’s paces.

I’m sure most read­ers have heard of OpenOf­fice. This soft­ware is top-​notch, at least on Ubuntu. I’ve seen it on Win­dows and it’s rather slow and ghastly. But on here, it loads up almost instantly, and I haven’t encoun­tered any file incom­pat­i­bil­ity issues. My ‘quicken-killer’ is Gnu­Cash. I imported my .qif easily and was able to make var­i­ous changes, bud­gets, and charts based on that data. Seems fine. I’ll put it through it’s paces a bit more over the next week. The most annoy­ing part is, of course, I don’t plan on using it as my pri­mary way to keep track of expenses, so I’ll be enter­ing in expenses twice over the next few weeks - once in Gnu­Cash, and once in iBank on the Mac.

Essen­tial Ubuntu software

Here is a list of non-​default soft­ware that I think a lot of OS X to Ubuntu switch­ers should look at:

1. Check­G­mail, sits in the panel and noti­fies you of new email.
2. Swift­fox, an opti­mized Fire­fox for dif­fer­ent architectures.
3. VLC, my favorite cross-​platform, cross codec media player
4. Beagle, Spotlight-​type search for GNOME. So far, seems pretty decent. -
5. Democ­racy Player
6. Exaile, Ban­shee, or Listen
7. Blue­fish Editor
8. Thun­der­bird
9. gFTP
10. Inkscape
11. gTwit­ter, a decent app that is much like Twit­terific for the Mac. Allows the user to update their Twit­ter page and view friend’s posts.
12. gnu­Cash
13. automatix - basi­cally a swiss-​army knife app that down­loads and installs a lot of soft­ware that doesn’t come with Ubuntu by default (video/audio codecs, non-​free soft­ware like Picasa & VMware, etc)

Other notes:

I removed beryl from my setup - it’s just too buggy still. I’ve read, how­ever, that the forth­com­ing Compiz Fusion that will be bun­dled in 7.10 will be a lot nicer. I’ll prob­a­bly hang on for that. I also unin­stalled the restricted NVIDIA dri­vers for my video card, and things seem a lot better now. Hiber­nate and Sus­pend work with­out a hitch, and the bat­tery life is cer­tainly better as well. I don’t have any of the super fancy effects, but I’ll prob­a­bly cross that bridge again soon. For now, I’ll go with the more ‘default’ setup.

Now that I have every­thing chug­ging along, I’m to the point where I think I may start exper­i­ment­ing with other window man­agers besides GNOME. I’ve down­loaded the Kubuntu (the KDE-based ver­sion of Ubuntu) CD, and might boot that up and see if I like KDE (and some of it’s asso­ci­ated apps) better than GNOME-​based apps. That, to me, is the great thing & awful thing about open source. The infi­nite choices can be really great, and you ulti­mately find what suits you best, but it can be quite the work­out. I recently read a book about this, and the search for the per­fect linux setup fits into the ‘more is less’ descrip­tion, for sure. Part of me says to be con­tent with what I have so far, and slowly branch out to find other soft­wares that might be better than appli­ca­tion x, but stick to what I know. The great thing is, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu install CDs let you boot into what is called a ‘live CD’, which basi­cally is the entire OS booted from the disc, with no need to install. Of course, you can’t save any­thing, and the whole thing runs rather slowly (maybe 85-90% of native speed), but it’s a great, quick way to see if some­thing is right for you.

At this point, though, I feel GNOME is right for me. There are some things that could use some work, but over­all it’s the best for a GUI purist like myself.

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3 Responses to “Essentials!”

1. Dustin says:
   July 1st, 2007 at 4:38 pm

   So is this a per­ma­nent depar­ture from MacOS, or just a side project type deal? If it is a move away, why? 10.5 that bad? haha

   I’ve been want­ing to get a linux machine going for a while but I haven’t messed with it since umm… 9th grade? I used Red Hat back then and it was a NIGHT­MARE. The only reason I didn’t go from Win­dows to Linux (at the time Mac was just too expen­sive for me) is because of how hard Red Hat was.
2. Daniel says:
   July 1st, 2007 at 9:28 pm

   I doubt I’d ever ditch the the Mac OS plat­form. This is more along the lines of, I needed a cheap laptop, and I felt with Dell’s recent offer­ing of Ubuntu-​based lap­tops, this would be a good way to get just that. Ubuntu works great out of the box, and even a rel­a­tive newbie like myself was able to find my way around. If you’re look­ing for some­thing full-​featured and easy to set up, Ubuntu is for you.

   But as under­whelmed as I may be by 10.5, it’s still as good or better than Vista and any Linux offer­ing. I just don’t feel it’s a very big leap over 10.4. But we both know I will still have it installed on my iMac soon after launch I’m sure.
3. ryan says:
   July 3rd, 2007 at 2:35 am

   At this point I can agree that nearly any­thing is better than vista. I like to con­sider myself fairly good with all things tech­nol­ogy and can usu­ally sit down at any elec­tronic device and have it fig­ured out pretty quickly.

   When I got my new Sony laptop a few months ago with Vista it lit­er­ally took me 30-45 min­utes to figure out how to get my stink­ing wire­less net­work­ing to work and on top of that another 30 min­utes to figure out how to unin­stall all the trash­ware that came on the thing. THEN another 2 hours to dis­able all the thou­sands of Vista “security” warn­ings every time I did some­thing.

   Vista = trash