Paul Kimbrel's Musing

Okay… big question to you iTunes weenies… why iTunes? In my quest for a pure Open Source system, I got stuck on iTunes since that’s been my sole source to buy digital music. But I’ve never liked the iTunes interface and hated that I couldn’t take my music to any computer and play it (especially since I have a computer in just about every room of my home).

Enter Amazon.

I just used the Amazon MP3 service. Same price as iTunes… and I got high quality MP3 files that I was able to put on my internal file server and use on all my computers… including my soon-to-be-installed Linux desktop. It appears that Amazon, unlike Apple, actually wrote a Linux client for their service.

Niiiiiiiice…

I’m currently enjoying The Choir’s, O How The Might Have Fallen. As MP3’s. Purchased from Amazon.

I like Windows XP. I really do. But Microsoft seems bent on ditching a decent operating system for Vista despite calls from them to be rational. I’ve talked to several people about their Vista experience and only two have had favorable results. And, of course, they have good reason - they both have Quad Processor, 2thz CPU, 200gig ram, 50 gig video monstrosities of machines. I believe their lights dim when they turn their respective machines on. Okay, slight exaggeration, but not much.

I really, really don’t want to spend a zillion dollars on new machines, plus whatever they want for a semi-professional version Vista, just because Microsoft wants pretty windows that zip around when you switch applications. And on top of all that, now all my MS Window weeny friends are buying macs. Hmmmmm… more hardware.

Well, I’ve decided to take the Open Source plunge again and try Linux on the desktop. My studio computer will still be stuck in XP land, but it took me 5 years to upgrade it from Windows 98, so I’ve got a few good years on it, yet.

My laptop, on the other hand, is my development and office productivity computer. That’s where I intend to switch to Linux. So I’ve made a list of things I need to do. These are MS-centric programs and behaviors that need to either change or be addressed before I can go Linux on my laptop. My goal? 100% free software.

1. MS Office - I’ll admit it. I like Office. It just works. Everyone else uses it. I use it at work. Open Office has made some great strides recently and I’ll have to see if it cuts the mustard for me. I know people have MS Office working under Linux, but my goal is 100% free software.
2. MS Outlook - I’ll admit this, too. I like Outlook. Not Outlook express - the full Outlook. It’s the perfect PIM in my mind… and it synchronizes well with my PDA. I’ve used Gnome’s Evolution, but I always seemed to have issues with it. I can’t remember why. I’ll either try it, or I’ll try Mozilla’s new Lightning project. It’s being funded by Open Office and looks a little nicer. Plus, I think I can synchronize with Google Calendar with it.
3. Secure USB Key - this I actually have working on free software, though I haven’t gotten it running under Linux, yet. I don’t think that will be an issue
4. Development - I use Eclipse to do my development, so hopefully that will be a non-issue. I do recall having problems getting my PHP extensions working under Debian, but that was almost 4 years ago.
5. PDF’s - My laptop actually came with a paid license to Adobe Acrobat. I don’t actually use it (or know what it does for that matter), but I do use the PDF “printer” feature that lets me “print” to a PDF. I use that to send invoices to my clients. It appears that Open Office has the ability to actually “Save As” to a PDF format, so hopefully that will come through for me.
6. DOS Box - Yea, I got on this retro kick and started playing old video games from my youth. Most of the shareware stuff from 3D Realms (formerly Apogee) is still for-pay, but things are a lot cheaper. One game I really liked was Crystal Caves (yea, that dates me). It used to be $35+ to buy the whole set. Now I can downloaded it for $10. I bought it. I love it. I want to keep using it. DOS Box is an excellent DOS emulator that emulates the old machines DOS would run on as well as the operating system. All the old games, Commander Keen, Crystal Caves, Monster Bash, Duke Nukem… even Wolfenstein 3D, all work very well under Dos Box - even the sound. I see there’s a version for Linux… hopefully it will work.
7. WinAmp - I have all my MP3’s on my laptop. I’m moving them to a secure file server that’s inside my firewall to free them from my laptop, but I need a decent media player. Not just a media player. A good media player. I like WinAmp. I use WinAmp. Heck, I paid for WinAmp. I will miss WinAmp. So far, all the media players I’ve used in Linux have sucked eggs. Hopefully that’s changed.
8. Imaging Tools - Ah, the bane of Linux. Before someone mentions the Gimp - please know that I detest the Gimp. What a great idea that’s never been implemented right. I’m serious. I want to draw and manipulate my pictures with a graphing tool - not a scripting tool. I know the Gimp has a lot of power, but it’s just not very accessible from the GUI. I haven’t used the Gimp in years, so maybe it’s better, but I’m not holding my breath.

That’s it for now. I’ll probably have more as time goes on. My goal is to go over my laptop with a fine toothed comb to back up all my data and find what programs I have lurking about that I never use but can’t live without. I’ve tried a few Live CD’s of Ubuntu (and friends), but I’m having a horrible time getting my wireless controller working. That’s apparently been a standard issue for Linux users for a while. If I can’t get it working, I’ll be stuck.

A while ago, my wife bought me a SanDisk Cruiser 4GB USB flash drive. The thing works pretty well, but for encryption, it uses SanDisk’s proprietary U3 software. U3 is nice and all, but it locked me into the Windows platform and I always seemed to have issues getting it to run on machines that I hadn’t already tooled around with.

I’ve been considering moving off the Windows platform on my development laptop, but the two things that have kept me on Windows was the Office suite (believe it or not… I like it) and the U3 software. I started looking around at other secure USB flash drives to see if anything would work with Linux and I couldn’t really find anything pre-installed. But everyone pointed to an open-source software package called “TrueCrypt.”

I considered getting another flash drive and installing TrueCrypt on it as a second, more platform independent data solution. However, I got to thinking… Do I really use the U3 software? It has a sync feature that is nice, but you can only sync a profile to a single machine. So I didn’t use it - ever. I just copied my documents to the flash drive periodically and called it a sync! So I decided to ditch it.

Thankfully, SanDisk did something rare for a hardware manufacturer… they actually listened to their customers. They put an uninstaller for the U3 software that will remove the “secret” partition on the drive and free it up to act just like a standard flash drive.

So, I backed up my files, uninstalled U3, and installed TrueCrypt on it. REAL tough… you copy the files to the drive. Phew… tough.

I ran TrueCrypt. It works by creating a file on the unencrypted partition that acts as a data store for an encrypted partition. The TrueCrypt drivers then use that data store and de/encrypt data from/to that file in real time as you use the encrypted “drive”. Through some relatively easy menu options, I was able to set up a drive that automatically mounted when I fired up TrueCrypt from the USB drive. There’s an “autorun.inf” file on the drive, but it doesn’t seem to want to run. So I just created a batch file that ran the same command.

So, now, all I have to do is stick the drive in, let the unencrypted drive mount, then run the “start.bat” file that I created in the root. TrueCrypt asks for my password and another drive mounts with my encrypted data.

Niiiiiiiiice…

Next up… trying it with Linux.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about where I’m going with the Office suite, I’m looking at IBM’s Symphony. It’s basically a nice facade to OpenOffice.

And for those who know me, you know that I’m Outlook junkie. Yea, yea… don’t bug me about it. Hey, I can’t find any other package that integrates contacts, emails, and calendars as well as Outlook. Well, except for Evolution. I used Evolution a bit when I was trying the Linux desktop thing once before. I’ll have to give it another go. I did hear from someone that Thunderbird has a calendar plug-in. I’ll have to see how well it works. I mainly need something that I can sync with my PDA…

I’ll post more my Linux Desktop migration again as it progresses. My main drive is a slightly unfounded fear of Vista.