The Ubuntu Files - Part 2

Right, so where were we? Oh yes I remember.
Right it's a week later and I have managed to get my home PC running at 90% XP efficiency in Ubuntu. Here's how.

First off, lets talk about Email, after sifting through all the most popular email offerings, trying to find one that could import my PST files, it turns out, that the only solution is to convert these PST files into a Linux readable format, something that has to be done in Windows :(. For now, I will just stick to using the GMail webend for my mail solution. Next I attempted to a decent download manager installed something that would operate with the flashgot plugin for FireFox. After trying out all the Ubuntu offerings and even writing a sh script to automate wget and to try using that, I can safely say, Ubuntu fails at download managers. They all suck. Eventually the best and most common solution I found was to install Windows Flashget on WINE and to use it thus. This, suprisingly works very well.

WINE, the Windows emulator for Linux. I think it says something about the Linux crowd or OS even, that the best feature of Linux is WINE, that is, it's ability to emulate Windows and run Windows binaries.

Next up I tried to configure my display, a word to the wise, never install the Emerald theme manager and if your Compiz is doing strange things, uninstall the Emerald theme manager. Compiz, unfortunately has a few bugs that need to get ironed out, which is unfortunate, but even so it still pretty damn awesome, and fast. I followed one or two easy to follow guides and managed to get my desktop doing all sorts of fancy tricks.

Mono. Well, lets see, I have a few simpl'ish applications that I had written to run on Windows in .net2, now I open up the solution files in Mono Developer, rebuild, and now, I have them running nicely on Ubuntu. I'm not quite sure how, seeing as how they all make use of System.Windows.Forms and Ubuntu isn't Windows. Mono Develop also has the ability to build packages for redistribution. The only bug or nuisance I have noticed so far is in Mono DateTime can never be a null type, so you cant compare a DateTime value to null, nor can you deserialize a null value DateTime from a file. But that's Ok, I am sure there are plenty more hassles like this that I have yet to encounter.

And finally last night I set up remote VNC which was as easy as clicking a checkbox, creating a password adding the DNAT on my router and downloading the windows VNC viewer (Tight VNC) on my Windows PC. It worked first time and it certainly makes remote admining from work a whole lot easier. I also installed Skype which has a Debian release, so that was cool.

Right, I will continue to run Ubuntu for a while as there is no reason, as of yet, that I shouldn't. I will check back in a while and tell you lot how it's going.