Now I have the latest version of Firefox.

I also removed the little desktop folder off the desktop and kept icons… I have to think of using a dock. Going to look for a decent one under KDE. SO that is about all I did for today.

I may play with layout some more later. But for now this is what it is. Shows information I personally need to know about my machine. And of course what the time is. I think I should put the clock back on the panel because most of the work I do covers up the desktop and I always have to minimize to see what time it is.

I imported pictures off a SD Card for our digital camera using F-Spot. It worked flawlessly. It was really easy and this shows that the card reader also works on the laptop under Linux. Wheeee! Now I have the pictures that Sarah this past month on my machine. That’s about 400 pictures. Seriously. We have taken over 8GB of pictures of Emma in the past year and a half almost. Think we’re obsessed with our child? Got a problem? Fuck you.

I took pictures of the labels I added onto the machine. As you see they look awsome! I trimmed the picture of Tux to remove the shadow that was in the original because it would look nasty with the white and gray shade that was in it. And yes I put a VooDooRadio logo sticker on my laptop. What’s it too ya! People will ask me about it if they see it and that promotes my show… Kinda… Sorta… Leave me alone!

During the last update, Ubuntu had released a version of Firefox called Shiretoko. It’s Firefox v.3.5 but looking up info on it. It’s a Beta of the browser. All I have to say is that Shiretoko is a little slo-mo. It locked up while uploading the pictures you see here. But also the original files are 3MB average each. But still. It runs a little ragged.

So we are nearing the end of the 30 Days point. Where do we go from here? I think I may continue to blog about running under Linux but we’ll see. Still missing some of the games I played under Windows and watching Netflix. But maybe I will load the games on the desktop and hope it will work ok.

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.

Again I am happy that I am able to organize a lot better than under Windows. I feel like it’s Laundry day!

Yes that is Linux Detergent you are seeing in the picture to the right. Micro&Soft is the maker? I have seen this picture floating around the interwebs for quite some time now. I still think it’s funny.

Ok let’s get into the final day of sorting and also there are some links to some more resources I wanted to share with you all. So please, read on…

The funny thing about this is I am finding a ton of duplicates and tag errors from when I was under iTunes. WTF?

With Linux there is a huge difference between a lowercase and uppercase letter so if you have tunes from a band where the tag is different by 1 letter it will be sorted into multiple directories.

For Example, on the last batch of music, I had songs by the group VAST however they were tagged Vast or VAST so I had 2 directories for VAST because of this. Under Winduhs, they omit the case if the primary directory is one name. So even though VAST was the folder name under that old OS, I had Vast in there as well. So, re-tagging the files will fix that all up. And behold the duplicate entries!

I also found some helpful resources as well. I added them to the links on the side, but here they are:

• ClubUbuntu – Here you can read articles about Ubuntu.
• Linux Linx - The Linux Portal
• Linux Starter Pack – A free e-book to help you get started with Linux
• Bash Guide For Beginners – Helps learn the terminal a little more
• Grokking the GIMP – Learn to use The Gimp image editor
• Linux Documentation Project – Tons of free ebooks and web based guides for Linux.

Speaking of Gimp, I am thinking of playing around with that some more soon.  So I looked up some more things for it, check out these pages:

• GimpShop – GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.
• Gimp Stuff – A community site for Gimp Users. Tons of extras for The Gimp

I am sure there is more out there, but this is what I found recently.

Ok now that I have sorted tunage,  I am going to create my first podcast under Linux! w00t!

Ok, that was lame. But seriously I have tried a new AIR app called Mixero and it’s pretty nice. Not as extensive as Tweetdeck, but very compact. A nice feature is you can make “channels” out of search items or hash tags

And you can group your contacts a litttle easier than Tweetdeck in my opinion. But at any rate this has nothing to do really with Linux because AIR is crossplatform. I thought I’d just share this little finding.

Today I learned that with my installing and uninstalling of some applications I inadvertently disabled the MySQL server somehow. Nothing a re-install couldn’t fix. Now it’s back up and running and I can start figuring out how I am going to set up apache to get it out of the default directory for testing sites locally.

I connected remotely to my desktop again to update my podcasts after I listened to a bunch in the middle of the day. So basically another day of not much done. When I got home from work I had dinner and watched TV and passed out around 10PM on the loveseat.

The issue I had with ripping movies in the past is the sound didn’t sync with the video. It was like watching an old Kung Fu movie but more annoying for the audio. You”d hear a bang and then see it 5 seconds later. Not good.

I looked around for some more games to play. I downloaded a RTS game called Warzone 2100. Here’s a blip from the developer:

Warzone 2100 is a real-time strategy game, originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive, now developed by the Warzone 2100 Project. Compared to other real-time strategy games, it has a greater focus on artillery, radar, and counter-battery technologies, more frequent in-game cinematic updates as game play progresses, a massive research tree, as well as a vehicle design system.

Now the only way to install this under Linux is to compile it so I have to do that… Later.

There is a windows based client so I can play with you Windows folks if you wanna.

So not too much done today, I had to look at a co-worker’s home computer for him. They were getting a lot of poor performance on their machine. Hrm WinXP and only 512MB of Ram?! BAD!

I post these the day after I do them. In other words, all this that I am posting here on Thursday was actually done on Wednesday. In case you hadn’t figured it all out yet.  Oh and today (Thursday 8/13) is my birthday. I don’t know what I will be able to do when I get out of work so Day 14 will be real short.

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!

Well… Perfect in the sense that it showed things and did things, but it was S…L…O…W as molasses because our network is a little on the laggy side.

So to announce I was able to connect from work to the home machine, I sent out a tweet using Gwibber. Of course my friend Graeme (of ITRadio fame) had to make a snarky reply.

Through there I was able to install a few things. I am trying to get my music sorted a little so I looked up a few possibilities to do so. People were saying that Cowbell was a program that aided in the sorting of your digital library so I installed that.

It was not quite what I had hoped it to be. It was basically a tag editor ONLY and did not sort your music files what-so-ever.

Rhythmbox also does not sort out the files into a nice Artist – Album manner so I did some more hunting around. Then it dawned on me. SONGBIRD! I had tried this out under windows before, it was decent, but people were calling it the iTunes killer app. Well, it’s not quite there yet. Yes it is a killer when it comes to functionality, resources,  and the add-ons. But it doesn’t have the podcast functionality iTunes has so a lot of people that listen to podcasts will be still drawn to iTunes, in my opinion.

So I installed Songbird. It imported all my media and it also sorted the files into the directory structure I mentioned earlier. So it works perfectly. Goodbye Banshee and Cowbell. Rhythmbox, you will be used for ripping audio CD’s  (another feature Songbird lacks). gPodder, you are definitely my podcast downloading and syncing solution.

After all this I played a little more in Second Life and called it a day.

Well today I had installed cheese (play with webcam). I also installed kq, Bub’s Bros. Fontmatrix, Flickr uploader, and then Tried Planeshift. It locked up horribly so forget that.

After that I installed Rengum Online which was toted as another MMORPG that was available for Linux. It didn’t start up and gave errors about drivers and DirectX. I will try updating the drivers later.

I don’t understand how a game that is made for Linux that uses OpenGL as it’s primary graphics can use DirectX which is a Microsot related graphics thing. *sigh*

I took a dive and seeing I didn’t really want to do it, I thought I’d give it another chance. I downloaded Second Life from GetDeb. I will install it tomorrow.

Evolution is the native mail client for Gnome. I prefer using GMail via web lately but I think I might use Evolution here and there. I also added a few contacts from Google’s mail which was an easy export and import. The nice thing about the contacts is it helps create a full adress book that you can add important dates and mailing info as well. This might be handy for other reasons as well, i.e. Family functions and mailing lists for holidays.

Aside from that I did my usual syncing of podcasts, general browsing, played a few games of Same Gnome and looked around for some MMO’s to check out. I installed PlaneShift to try it out. I haven’t created an account on their site to do so yet, but I heard a good write up of it. I will review it later on. There are a few others I am going to try out. Of course Second Life is available for Linux, but I sooooo want to stay away from that for some reason. I think primarily it’s because there really is no point to that game. I mean no level ups, no fighting beasts, you just fly around and talk. It’s a chat room on meth and just as addictive.

I downloaded a game called PlaneShift which is a free MMORPG. Not as good as Rapellz… Man I am missing that game. I should just install it on the Windows machine to play it. But I digress…

I said I wanted to Rip and Burn DVD’s as one of my points of usage for a computer, so I played with that. However I ran into some issues.

Stupid me forgot to get the package to read encrypted DVD’s (which is basically EVERY movie DVD out there) so I had to install it. If you are trying to watch movies, do this:

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.