running & settling in

Weekly cleansing schedule is here
Temporary closure notice is here
Maintenance schedule is here

testing one two three.

Tags: flock

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Today marks a new day for my cyber life. I finally got rid TOTALLY of Microsoft!! Hurray!!

After quitting two jobs that I worked concurrently for the past year and they both used Microsoft, I can now enjoy the new found freedom to ditch anything Microsoft. The hardest to kick out for anyone is Outlook since so many companies use Exchange Server for their emails.

Here is my deal: I own a ThinkPad ultraportable X61 that used to run XP. I installed an Ubuntu desktop on it as a regular program that can be removed from within Windows (I do intend to keep Windows as a remote backup plan). My ThinkPad can dual-boot with either Windows or Ubuntu. The dual boot works just fine for me.

Booting up is quick though I hate the text screen of technical messages during boot-up.

I need to log in with my username and password which I assigned during my installation.

In no time am I given the standard Ubuntu desktop. It is not fancy at all. I have yet to look for prettier themes / wallpapers.

I will skip a few steps here...

Installing email software, Mozilla Thunderbird

Then I started to first install my email. Ubuntu Desktop comes with Evolution Mail. I have not tried it yet. Since I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird for a while and it has a Linux version, I decided to stick to Thunderbird for now. The nice thing about Thunderbird is that I can have my email data file stored on my thumb disk which I carry around all the time (mind you, I am a very mobile user). One quick note though, if your company uses Exchange Server, just forget about anything 'Open' because Microsoft is just one big advocate of proprietary software. Thunderbird talks to all standard email servers, POP & IMAP, just not Exchange.

The Thunderbird I installed was 2.0b. It is a tar.gz. Many people have told me how difficult or user-unfriendly Linux' installation is. I feel that too. However, I was lucky enough to find the right information to guide me through it. It is nothing more than a few simple commands in a Ubuntu terminal (if you are not used to typing commands in a 'terminal' then this may feel strange to you). Thanks to a clear and helpful tutorial, I installed it without a sweat:

1. I downloaded it from Mozilla.org (it has a number of different language versions. Although I am Chinese, I use the English [GB] version, knowing that my Chinese emails will display just fine in my English [GB] Thunderbird. I just hate funny / cryptic Chinese menus and user interface in any software I use. It is not a problem about Chinese, it is one about translation.)

2. I use Archive Manager to extract it and I think you can use any other software to extract it. Extract it to a location and mark the location. I will denote the extracted to location as <path>.

3. Move the extracted archive to this location (/usr/local is where you put the apps you build):

sudo mv <path>/thunderbird /usr/local

4. Link it as follows:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/thunderbird/thunderbird /usr/local/bin/thunderbird

5. Install it by apt-get: sudo apt-get thunderbird

6. You are now ready to run Thunderbird by just typing 'thunderbird' in a terminal. Alternatively, you can create a menu item for it.

7. Type 'alacarte' in a terminal to invoke the menu set-up. Create a 'New Item' under 'Applications'->'Internet'. Call the 'New Item' 'Thunderbird'. Voila.

Find out about GTK version Software running on Linux / Ubuntu requires GTK. Very often you have to find out if your system supports certain software. You need to look at your GTK version. Here is how:

dpkg -l libgtk[0-9]* | grep ^i

I have mine at 2.14.

Installing mplayer to play WMV movies Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid universe multiverse deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid universe multiverse

Then update & install them using these commands:

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mplayer

Voila

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list; sudo apt-get -q update; sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring; sudo apt-get -q update

Installing the GPG key:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

Enhancing Flash & Mplayer plugins in Flock Flock shares part of the same code with Firefox. So they share the same plugins too.

I have had a problem with installing Flash plugins in Flock, as do many other Flock users. So I follow the advice of InverseFlux and did this:

cd ~/flock sudo cp /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/*.* plugins/~

Voila! Now my Flock runs smoothly with Youtube & other Flash videos.

Upgrading to Kubuntu

Kubuntu (running on KDM & KDE) is so much better Ubuntu (running on Gnome). It looks like a competitive enough product to Windows.

Tags: linux, oss, no microsoft, kubuntu, ubuntu, flash, mplayer

Joomla 1.5

1. Navigate to the language\en-GB folder in your Joomla dir.
2. Edit the en-GB.ini file.
3. Find %A or %H in "LC2=" string
4. Change to the desired format. All the format codes are here.
http://php.net/manual/en/function.strftime.php

I have been wanting to get rid of Microsoft and proprietary software from my life. It has not been easy. Now I am totally clean.

Here is my journey.

First, I removed all the Microsoft applications on all of my computers by replacing each with an open source application, as far as possible. Yes, I have not been able to remove them all. I would tell you more on why. But for those that I can, here they are and their open source counterparts:

Internet Explorer-> Mozilla Firefox (There are other variations using the same code. Since it is one of the major open source project, some developers use the same code to develop their variations.) and Opera.
Outlook Express, Outlook (Email)-> Mozilla Thunderbird (I use this mostly) and Evolution Mail (it comes with my Ubuntu 8.10 and that comes after I switched to Linux. There isn't one version on XP).
Outlook (Calendar)-> Mozilla Sunbird (I am happy with this one because I can share calendars in ICS format with others)
MSN Messenger-> Meebo (more about this. It is not a clean transition.)
Microsoft Office -> Open Office and Star Office

Second, I replace other proprietary applications with open source applications:

Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape, Open Office Draw
Adobe Photoshop -> GIMP
Adobe PageMaker -> Scribus

Third, I switch from Windows XP to Linux.