I still have the ability to transfer stuff to my iPod with no issue, but I can’t listen to MP3′s on the laptop or even watch videos for that matter. What did I do wrong? I know I must have killed something, but I cannot find out where. BACKUP TIME!

So I moved the new pictures, music, and videos I ripped and transcoded onto the handy dandy external hard drive… And now the big decision. Do I attempt a reinstall over this installation and hope it fixes the issue that way or do I try out another flavor of Linux.

I chose that I would stay with the Ubuntu family. But I will try Kubuntu unstead. For those who do not know what this is. It’s Ubuntu with KDE as it desktop instead of Gnome. Now I have used KDE a LONG time ago with Mandrake Linux. When Linux was still kind of a clunky and not so userfriendly Operating system. Although there is some things you still should install via terminal there are a lot of things you can use the GUI to install things onto the system. But you always have the terminal (aka command line) to help in doing things quicker.

So I basically began downloading Kubuntu from it’s main site and burned the CD under Gnome. Did a completely clean install of Kubuntu and did the updates.  Tommorrow I begin reinstalling some applications or poking to find what I can use that I used under Gnome.

I got this setup from the Ubuntu Blog website which it was very helpful, but seeing how I am wireless more I needed more variables to add to my setup. And this information was easily obtainable from Conky’s Sourceforge site more specifically the variable section.

The one thing I have been finding out about conky is that is is very tedious to really set it up. There is no “user friendly” GUI to configure it like the Screenlets so you have to do a lot of text editing to get it to work right. And you have to really ignore word wrap.

Another little thing about conky is when you make changes you can kill the process (I use top in the terminal to kill it) and restart it, reboot the machine, or log out of your Gnome session. I have used all three and logging out seems to be a little quicker than the other two. Go fig.

Also I learned that gPodder has an option to skip podcasts when syncing them to your iPod. So the Ubuntu Podcast has been set to that because of the file format issue with the iPod.  You can also set up an autodelte ever 30 days or whatever you want. I prefer to manually do it, but that’s just me. Also you can save the files somewhere else if you please. This is  a nice option because some shows I like to archive or edit to get bits for my show (ala “This is Why we’re Fat” from Nobody Likes Onions being inserted into my show).

I have been shutting down the machine lately so I don’t log in from work too much. But I still think I got some things done in the short time I did them.

I am now trying to think of what I should remove or tweak next. I find it funny that with all the programs and files I have on the system now it’s only 20GB used and a large portion of that is the documents and files I have in my home folder Can we say Bloatware?

I am looking back on the things I have been doing through this experiment and it pleases me to see I am able to do a lot of things I was able to do under Windows just fine.

Netflix REALLY needs to get on the ball with the instant streaming stuff because this is a pain in the nuts having it be Silverlight 2.0 only. That is primarily one of the only things I miss so far.

Speaking of streaming I need to think about finding info about how to get my DirecTV DVR and this machine to talk so I can stream movies or pictures. I got it going under windows before. I also will have to hard-wire the laptop so I can get a decent connection for that as well.

It would be awesome to be able to stream videos off of the lappy because I have a ton of AVI’s I backed up onto DVD-R’s that I could easily copy onto the hard drive to play better. Maybe I will do this later today.. Or start that.

However the other one was correct and things went fine. More movie backups made. Go me.

I updated to a new version of Firefox that the name escapes me as I write this, but it’s a ubuntu based fork of 3.5 that seems to work fine. I also imported all my old bookmarks that I exported when I was under windows.

Also I found the Ubuntu Vidcast site. But the thing doesn’t play on my iPod because it’s in Ogg Vorbis. Dernit! And the video link for the ipod is a iTunes link. GAH!

I didn’t really pick up the laptop except to check the weather and search for the phone number for a pizza joint that we got pizza from a while back. Also I updated my ipod as I do every day and did a little stumbling (StumbleUpon) using the firefox bar extension.

I also installed the Trillian smiley set for Pidgin. I forgot I had it on my external HD. There is still some things that are on there I have to decide on keeping on there.

Looks like MySQL stopped working for some reason. I don’t know why. Looks like I am going to have to research this crap now. *sigh*

I also found that Songbird has an iPod add-on but it looks like it’s geared more towards earlier generation iPod’s. It picks my iPod up but it’s not seeing my playlist on there. Also I tried subscribing to some podcasts and it didn’t pick up anything when I added a subscription (Distorted View was my test subject for this). Let’s hope the next day is better.

Still bummed about the mixer. Thinking of picking up a headset soon as I can. Just can’t right now. Maybe I will pull out the original USB mic I used on the show MANY moons ago.

I watched ITRadio on the live stream and it was running decent aside from the slight skipping because of the wireless connection, but I managed to overcome throwing my machine out the window because of it.

I didn’t do too too much because it was my birthday. I actually removed a few programs that didn’t work too well on the machine (mainly some games) but aside from that everything is still running swell.

I hope to work on a podcast soon. It’s been a few weeks since I last put one out. I haven’t even hooked up the mixer to this machine to see if it can work with Audacity properly. Oh well something to set my sights on I guess.

I basically watched TV last night and had my birthday cake and opened presents from Sarah and Emma. I got 2 iPod cases (1 hard the other is one of the soft rubber ones) some pants and some T-shirts which I needed badly. Emma signed the card and brought me the big bag that the presents were in. My sister and her kids stopped by and gave me cards and a little VW Bug car that Emma loves to play with now.

I will have more things that I have done on the machine tomorrow because I barely spent time doing anything on this day.

When Transmission opened I chose where to save the download and voila torrent downloading.  Simple.

While waiting for the torrent to do it’s thing I moved some files from my external hard drive to my home folder to sort out things that I have floating around. Some music I put into the Music folder and when I launched Songbird it sorted it for me. YAY!

I really need to reorganize the HUGE collection of music I have on the large External and  catalog them all as well. I think I will look for a program that can help me with that soon.

Poking around the Add/Remove Programs application I poked around for some more programs I wanted to check out. I tried Ardour which is a audio editor that has been

Installed Kraft which is a small business program for creating invoices and tracking inventory.

I also install Internet DJ Console which for some reason isn’t running. Hmmm.. Looking into that later.

I also installed a game called Open City which seems to sound like another SimCity clone. I will check this out because LinCity-NG seems totally different than expected.

I want to get my Razr set up to get pictures and sounds off it so I installed gMobileMedia to see if that is something that will help with that. I know moto4lin is supposed to handle that as well but I need to dig deeper into configuring it to work.

I am thinking of trying to get some vector graphics made for designing stuff so Inkscape was the next thing I installed. It’s a replacement for Adobe Illustrator.

I like putting pictures on my iPod from time to time and GpixPod is suppsed to handle that

I installed an app called Camera which is listed as an app to aid in getting pictures off of digital cameras. If I can’t get the card reader going (yeah I haven’t tested that yet) I am going to see how this works out.

I am thinking of making my own Fonts sometime so I installed FontForge

For some web development I figured I’d install MySql Manager to help with databases. I think I am doing something wrong because it won’t connect to any database I use (local or remote).

Yet another test of an audio application that can sync podcasts and handle my music library, I checked out Exaie Music Player, which I installed some of the extras but didn’t play with it that much.

I am trying to see if I can connect to this site from my desktop rather than loading up Firefox and logging into my site so I installed BloGTK which supposedly connects to WordPress blogss.

I have a TON of pictures of my daughter and I saw a lot of picture mosaics out there  and think I would like to make one of her. I found a program called Pixelize that is supposed to do exatly that. Take a bunch of pictures and make a mosaic of them to produce 1 picture.

I Removed Gwibber because I am using TweetDeck and it seemed redundant to have 2 programs to tweet with.

I had another DVD I wanted to rip (for backup purposes, yeah that’s it) so I decided to try dvd::rip this time. It was getting late so I started the rip of the main movie and hit the sack. More on this tomorrow!

So to fix this I subscribed to 1 feed inside of Rhythmbox (the default audio player in Ubuntu 9.04). I plugged in my iPod and after it noticed it was connected, I dragged and dropped the latest episode onto the iPod.

I loaded up gPodder and had it do it’s sync and  all the episodes that were not marked as played went right onto the iPod. However it kept the 1 episode from Rhythm box, which is no big deal.

I unplugged my iPod and head off to work with all my new podcasts ready to play. The ONLY downside to gPodder is that when the podcast uses cover art for their shows it doesn’t show on the iPod.  For example, VooDooRadio’s Last show had a special cover art that I made for the episode. When I was using iTunes under Windows the episodes would have that picture I made, but under gPodder. Nothing. Nada. BAH!

Maybe I missed something. I dunno.

So basically nothing new installed. Just conquered a small little issue that I found as important for my work day. Listening to shows as I work makes me feel more productive.

After  I installed it I loaded up a bunch of podcasts. It got 99% of them fine. For some odd reason it hates Talkshoe RSS feeds (so the Awful show’s feed was defunct).  After downloading all the current epidodes of the 45 feeds I added manually (suck it doesn’t have an OPML import function), I tried syncing, it didn’t add any new shows on there. I then removed the podcasts off the iPod manually from it’s list within the program.

I tried syncing again. Nothing. I went into gPodder and now it couldn’t even read the device. WTF? I headed over to the windows machine and restored the iPod thinking I messed up somewhere. Hooked it back up, still nothing.

So I finally just gave up.  Stay tuned for the outcome of this in Day 5.

I played with gPodder some more to understand it’s workings. I figured it out I think. Some folks say this is one of the best apps for syncing your iPod. So far it seems that way.

I removed all the old shows on the iPod and loaded up all the newly downloaded episodes. Synced the iPod an voila!

I installed Ubuntu-Tweak, Compiz Manager,  Screenlets, and Avant Window Navigator (AWN). Now with AWN it makes the system look a little “Macintosh-ish” but I like the way it handles running applications and some of the other features are real nice. Very similar to Object Dock for windows as well. If you look at the screen capture I put up as a tumbnail for this post you will see the way the desktop looks now.

Ok, I now installed Skype. I downloaded .deb file from website. Double clicked and installed. Ran the program, logged into my Skype account. So far so good. Hey Webcam works under Skype awesome! I hope it works for other things as well. We’ll see.

Installed Avast antivirus – Initial download instructions I found were not right so I downloaded it directly from site and manually installed. Downloaded updates and setup for a scan. I ran scan (took a while because I did a FULL scan and had my external HD hooked up. Might as well, I was on a windows system, heh).

For graphic manipulation I downloaded Pixel (website). Pixel is a RGB, CMYK and HDR image editing, photo retouching and manipulating program available for many operating systems formerly known as Pixel32. It is available for Windows, Linux, Linspire, MacOSX, BeOS, Zeta, QNX, MorphOS, FreeBSD, eComStation, OS/2, SkyOS and even old plain DOS, for both x86 and PowerPC architectures. It’s exactly like Photoshop!

I registered this software a long time ago when I initially was thinking of switching, so it is a bonafide copy. But you can check out the demo.

I noticed on a reboot I didn’t check start at login on a few items, now I have Skype, Pidgin and all my screenlets loading up when I get into the system. Pidgin somhow doesn’t have the option to load when the OS boots up so I had Gnome remember all applications running when I shut down. This should help that perfectly.

I can’t believe I forgot to install my add-ons for firefox. Namely the Gmail Manager to check my mail and Stumble Upon. I use the Gmail Manager to check all my email for both my domain hosted mail and my original Gmail account I had gotten a long time ago.

I have a Motorola Razor that I like to plug into the USB port primarily for charging. In order to do so I needed to install moto4lin for it to work. Very simple to get because its located in the repositories so apt-get worked like a charm.

I downloaded Gourmet Recipe Manager to keep my recipes. Downloaded version on Sourceforge rather than the one in the repositories for it’s more up to date. Gourmet Recipe Manager is a gtk-based recipe organizer and shopping list generator intended for GNOME (though it does not need all the GNOME libraries). Gourmet can import Mealmaster(tm) files and can export recipes in a number of formats, including text, RTF and web pages. Gourmet also can calculate nutritional information for recipes. I tested it by adding the recipe for the New Mexico Cow Patties I made last week.

I got some games today that were all in the repositories (I went into the Add/Remove Programs area and chose Games). The game I installed were the GFCE NES Emulator, Glest, LinCity-NG, Scorched 3D (a classic favorite of mine), Secret Maryo Chronicles, ZSNES Emulator (Super NES Emulator). I downloaded Alien Arena but it crashed whenever I played the darn thing.

Ok enough games, I need to get things for web design. I already have the graphic tools, now for the editors. I downloaded Kompozer (website) because NVU is no longer being made. I needed something that is an alternative to Dreamweaver and this was highly recommended. It’s the same folks that made NVU so let’s hope it works just as good.

Ok, it’s time for DVD ripping and making time! I installed dvd::rip, Dvd955 convertor and ManDVD. I will play with these more VERY soon.

While poking around the Add/Remove Programs app, I found a Pre-School Bundle in the Education section. So I grabbed it for teaching my daughter things. She needs to learn to use a mouse first.

Installed XChat for IRC, Art Manager for making the computer look pretty.  Now the Art Manager supposedly connects to Gnome-Look.org for its content. I tried installing a theme and it failed. Oh well try more later.

Graeme called me and was having issues with Nasusa Live’s chatroom so I attempted a login to uStream using Xchat. Either they are having IRC issues again or it was quasi-fail. Normally XChat works fine.

Well, sadly Amarok was not working properly, so I uninstalled it. I tried playing Distorted View and it just skimmed right through it. Where VLC and Rhythm Box worked perfectly fine.

That is Day 2. Day 3 will contain less installations (I hope) and more hankering down and reporting what I was able to accomplish with Linux based software over my old M$ Habit.

I completely backed up all my important Windows based things (in case I return to windows) and all my important documents (podcasts, itunes settings, pictures, and other stuff) onto my external harddrive.

Took a DEEP breath and put the installation CD into my CD drive and rebooted the machine.

The setup process is pretty cut and dry. Choose language and locations,  input name, choose username, choose a strong password, partition the hard drive… Okay this is where I REALLY took a deep breath because I told it to use the ENTIRE DISK! Sit back as it erases and formats all of the hard drive and installs the OS.

After it was done installing I rebooted the machine. Automatically wireless connection works! And now to download all the updates since I burned the install CD (186 updates to perform). After that I had to reboot again so the new kernel will take place.

Once I was back up I installed the Flash Player, VLC, Ubuntu restricted extras then I installed Boxee (reported they had Netflix Playback, dunno as of yet, need to play with it).

I then setup Pidgin for instant messaging. I miss Digsby, but I have used Pidgin before under windows. I can’t wait for Digsby to have a Linux version. HURRY GUYS!!!!

Next, I installed Amarok and Syncropated! to see if that will get the iPod podcasting need situated. Apparently Amarok discontinued podcast features in the latest version.

This sucks, its a decent player so I will keep it for other things I guess.

I then installed gPodder. With gPodder, I resubscribed to all my old podcasts that were under windows.. Now to wait for them to download..  Zzz… Okay I can’t sit doing nothing, so I moved on while it downloaded them.

I uninstalled Sycropated! It didn’t work at all. Some of my resources that I found on Google mentioned using it, but I guess it was for the older iPods and not the Widescreen Nano I have currently.

I downloaded Adobe Air to install so I could get Tweetdeck back. After installing Air I got Tweetdeck installed and tweeting is back for me. Yay!

I installed Wine but I have not toyed with it yet. Wine is supposedly useful incase you need to run a Windows based application. But I don’t know if I will be playing with it just yet. Trying to seperate myself from the Microsoft OS Crutch.

Lastly I changed my desktop image to something personalized. Didn’t feel like staring at the brown themed desktop that is the default one. After this I decided it really was time for bed. I started this at 7:30 PM but I feel I got a lot done during this time. More to do tomorrow.

I have been a user of Windows since version 3.0 came out and in my opinion it’s become a crutch for my computer needs. It’s also been increasingly bloated and bothersome to say the least.

I have dabbled with Linux. But now I have decided to attempt a completely Windows Free system.

My flavor of choice for this experiment: Ubuntu Linux

I want to experience this operating system to the fullest. That means all the things I do under windows I will be doing it under Linux.

I have planned to do this for sometime, now I am actually going to take the dive. To get a hint of what I do on a computer here is a list of things that come to mind off the bat:

• Podcasting
• Web Design
• Gaming
• Web Browsing
• DVD Authoring
• Graphic Design
• Chat (IRC, Instant messaging  and Voice)
• Video Streaming
• iPod Listening (daily)

I have already found the alternatives to Windows programs so I feel I am on the way to a good experience.

I will post once a day of what I accomplished. And attempt screenshots to share as a photoblog experience. And when possible I will try a videoblog (aka vlog) of what I have done as well.

I think that anytime I NEED to use windows I will be on the other machine (the desktop that is shared with Sarah). But it will be far and few in between.

So tonight I am doing my last necessary things under Windows (aka backup) as I begin to install Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04.