I didn’t mess anything up this time under Gnome. Everything was working fine. But I decided to back up and do a clean install of Kubuntu. Everything is back up and running and nothing was really lost (except time to get everything).

So last night I loaded up some games. I love the RTS genre so I got Spring Loaded and the Evolution mod. I would really like to play the Star Wars mod but it’s closed for beta testing.

I found my iTalk finally so hopefully I will be doing a new podcast. I really need to find a new power cord for the mixer but I cannot afford it. So please if you wanna help out with VooDooRadio donate!

I have audacity installed and now I have to figure how to work with it better. It’s been WAY too long since I used it. And hopefully I can make a show as good as I used to under Audition when I was under Windows.

I know I could take the OLD microphone I have (either the USB Logitech or the Radio Shack Omnidirectional) and plug it into the mic jack on the laptop. But the quality is really crumby. I paid good money for a condenser mic and now I can’t use it because the mixer has no power. This is very frustrating to me.

But anyway, nothing much to report on. Everything is running the way I like it more or less.

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.

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.

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.