me, myself and I

Anybody who knows me knows I am a person who doesn't fit into any one category when it comes to computer use? for this reason I've started trying to separate my personal and my professional "personalities" even so much as to set up a Microsoft Live account for my professional side and Google's Gmail for personal.

Professionally I use Windows, Visual Studio (ASP.NET and VB.NET primarily), Office, Visio, SQL Server, Adobe Acrobat, Crystal Reports and Paint.NET.  At home I use Linux and software and do graphics/desktop publishing and website design.  You can probably tell that these two technologies don't mix very well with each other.

Why should my laptop be any more organized than me?

So I got to thinking, how can I "merge" these two worlds best, how can I set up the laptop to manage both halves of my computing?  With a dual-boot system, that means I'll need at least 2 partitions; WindowsXP and Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 in this case), plus a /boot partition (in case Windows needs to fix the MBR) and a swap partition.  Then it came to me, include a data island partition as well.

The data island partition is a middle ground partition formatted a a vfat32 and have files (and only files, no configurations) stored there. This way I don't have to try and set up the snaking directories in each other system to access the files on the other partitions or have to remember which system such-and-such file resides.

Windows XP and Ubuntu would need space for their operating systems and configuration files but do not need much more than that. I may be able to move My Documents to point directly to the data island so long as no configuration and hidden files are stored.

Now you may notice that the data island is not all that big, being only 5 GB. The handy part of this is that this size should fit on a burnable DVD for backing up!  This will depend, though, on how much space I find Windows and Ubuntu really need based on my existing systems.

POP EMAIL

An issue I have run across from my dual-existence has been the use of email!  If I use POP I don't want to download into one location and then not run across an email I want to respond to if I am using a different system/OS. Plus getting email downloaded from one application to be read by another is not the easiest thing to do and since this is a laptop I don't want to be tied down to either require a local server (at home) or network connection (IMAP, Webmail, etc.).

Possible Solution: Thunderbird is cross-platform. Having it installed in both Operation Systems and point my account(s) to a location on the Data Island may just allow me to download my POP email into this central location in which either version of Thunderbird (windows or linux) can access.

PICTURES

This is probably one of the most common files I collect and want available from just about any system and is one of the reasons I started setting up a home file server. Obviously I will be able to leverage this if the pictures are located in one location for Live Photo Gallery or F-Spot to acquire. Yes, I could also use Picasa on both systems and try to leverage tags similarly to email (above).

DOCUMENTS

As long as OpenOffice.org can open the MS Office files (Office 2000, version 2007 is on the work laptop) this should not be a big issue. I wonder if there is a plugin for MS Office to open OpenOffice files saved in their native format?

MULTIMEDIA

Luckily there is a plug-in that allows Windows Media Player to play OGG and OGG Vorbis files, plus I can use Fluendo plugin for GStreamer to allow Linux to play MP3s legally.  I'm not sure what formats Banshee-Helix can handle but that may provide for additional media formats.

.NET

I guess this would be a good manner of testing .NET on Windows and Mono on Linux.  Since this is one of the compelling uses I have for Windows I know I'll be installing Visual Studio Express and SQL Server express but this can also be very interesting to try it on Mono.

IMAGE MANIPULATION

I can either go through Photoshop or just install GIMP on both systems. The GIMP can open Photoshop files but that is also like MS Office <=> OpenOffice.org where it may be 80% compatible and most people only use 80% of an applications capabilities so often it works out fine!

Things not compatible:

• Microsoft Visio is not compatible with DIA.
• Microsoft Publisher is not compatible with Scribus and OpenOffice does not have a Desktop Publishing agent
• Windows Live Writer doesn't have an equivalent in Linux, though there are some blog-writing applications which may be cross-platform
• I don't know how well Microsoft Access and OpenOffice Base are compatible
• FileMakerPro does not work in Linux

Of course Wine may be coming into the mix and we'll see what happens. I'll try and post the results if/when I get this done.