Ok, with the new laptop I’m thinking there are times I’ll be parked in the living room, but want to access my files on the desktop. I poked around a bit and had to piece together a couple of tips to get things setup right.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron uses Nautilus-share to handle the file sharing. So open a location and right-click on a folder you want to share… towards the bottom you should see “Sharing Options”. If you don’t, try this in the terminal…

sudo apt-get install nautilus-share

If it is already installed, you’ll get a message saying so. If not, you should be good to go… after you do the the following; in terminal run this -

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Then in the Global Settings section add the following line somewhere:

usershare owner only = False

Save, close gedit, and restart everything and you should be good to go. No say you want to share your Pictures folder, open your Home folder, right-click on Pictures and click that Sharing Options menu item.

If you want to just allow read access, only use the top check box “Share this folder”, give it a new name if you want. If you want to allow write access, there’s “Allow other people to write in this folder” check box. They will need a login on the computer doing the sharing to get at this though. If you want to allow just anyone access, there’s the “Guest access” option. You probably don’t want to combine that with write access, but that’s just me.

Anyways, after this… my windows laptop had no problems seeing the folders I shared.

Ok, as I posted yesterday, I bought a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. The biggest problem with it, it runs Vista.

I’ll deal for now, but there are a number of things that have to be done to make this thing “ready to fly”. First thing I did was download Firefox. I haven’t done a lot with add-ons with FF3 yet, but I’ll have to look in the best way to sync my bookmarks tween work, home and laptop now. Second thing I did was burn the restore DVDs, so if I need to, I can go back to factory fresh. I am debating on taking this thing down the Linux road… we’ll see. I have some programs I need Windows to run, so until I can test them on the desktop with Wine, I won’t be going that route.

Next thing was ditch MacAffe for AVG. Just a no-brainer there. I had to bite my tongue in Best Buy - While waiting for someone to help me, I observed another sales guy talk to a customer about antivirus and spyware, giving him two packages. “They both have anti-virus and spyware, but the spy-ware on this one sucks, and the virus protection this one sucks, so between these two you’ll be covered.”

Next was Open Office. There’s a 60-day trial of Office on here… need to figure out how to get rid of it without messing anything up. I wish I could get Evolution for Vista… I’m using it on my desktop and rather like it, so will probably stick with Thunderbird for now.

I have AutoCad, a mapping program, and some construction related stuff for work I need to get on here, but beyond that I’m not sure that I’ll be putting that much more. I have portable versions of a few things like GIMP, Pidgin and a couple others on my thumb drive that I may use here and there. The whole idea is for me to keep this thing light-weight. The majority of the stuff being done on it will be web based or basic spreadsheet and document writing.

Oh yea, when I unpacked the thing, the battery said 75%, and about 1.5 hours remaining. So I figured.. hey.. 2 hour battery. Not bad. Not great. But now that i’s fully charged, it’s telling me there is just over 3 hours remaining… so that’s better. I may look into a second, or a larger battery… but will wait and see how much I need to work just off battery for a bit first.

I bought a new laptop last night, and yes, I am blaming my sister.

Ok, need to back up. Seven Eight years ago next month, my niece and nephew were born. Waaaaay too early. They were born at like 24 or 27 weeks. Cole weighed a whopping 1lb, 11oz when he was born. His sister came in at 1lb 1oz. Unfortunately, they’ve been dealing with issues every since.

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So the other night I finally got around to doing a bit of “cleaning up” around the office. Actually, I’ve been tackling re-organizing the home office a bit for a few weeks as I’ve been transitioning to a new job - which is why I haven’t posted much lately as well (more on that another time).

The other night, it was time to tackle the computer itself. I recently purchased a second hard drive, a 500GB SATA that I picked up at Best Buy for just under $100 on sale. This will go along with the 350GB already in my Acer, and the 120GB external. I should be set for a lil while.

I also put the ATI TV Wonder card in the Acer, and I was going to put my LG LightScribe DVD burner in as a second drive… but while the ribbon cable on the current drive is standard, and has a second connector… all my power connections were for SATA type drives, not IDE. I guess I’ll have to look for an adapter. The hard drive came with one that would have converted the “old style” to use with the hard drive, but I need one for the other way around I guess. Or maybe I only need one optical drive… we’ll save that for later.

I didn’t want to just do an upgrade from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron, I had messed a couple things up just enough that I was hoping a fresh install would give me a chance to learn from my initial mistakes. That was part of why I bought a second drive, thinking I would do the new install on the new drive. Well, I still have a bit to learn about Linux and file partions… I need to force myself to sit down and read up about it.

No, I don’t need to know this to make things work. Actually, the install went pretty painlessly. The install program recognized my 7.10 install, and offered to put it on a separate partition, which I did. It has made migrating my data over very very easy. It basically repartitioned the drive so it now has a 112.4GB partition that is my old 7.10 install. Eventually, I will nuke it to reclaim the space, but now I know I can take my time in migrating everything over.

The partitioning is what took the longest, but the rest of the install was just as easy as it had been in 7.10. Now when I boot, it even gives me the option to boot to either 8.04 or 7.10.

Once the install was done, I started doing some poking around. There was a message about copying over my previous profile… and when I brought up Evolution, all my mail was there… almost. My IMAP settings for my five main accounts (yea.. five) were there, but my local folders were not. The contacts and other info was not either. However… a simple copy of certain files and folders from the .evolution folder on that 7.10 partition to the new one had me back in business.

Speaking of business… I had to upload some files for work. I LOVE Filezilla on Windows, and I’ll be honest - I was a bit disappointed with the Linux version. It’s just not as poslished or something. The window that list my folders/ftp sites does not remember the settings when I resize it… and the default opens so small it is hard to view the list of sites I manage. But performance wise, most of the same features I love about it are there, but some just act differently. Not a huge issues, just takes getting used to I guess. I decided to try a different FTP program since I had to reinstall anyways, and Kasablanca was on the list when I did a quick search under Add/Remove Applications. All I can say is… blech.

I spent about 15 minutes and couldn’t get it to connect to a server. Yes, I realize I was most likely doing something “wrong”, but I’m not a beginner, it shouldn’t have been that much of a hassle just to connect to a site. So I went back to Filezilla.

Now I need to get mp3 and a few other things up and running so I can listen to some of my favorite podcasts and such.

The Ubunutu Community Documentaton site has some easy to follow instructions for doing this. There’s a package to install via Add/Remove Applications, or one apt-get command to run, and bada-bing, bada-boom - you can now play most common multimedia formats, including MP3, DVD, Flash, Quicktime, WMA and WMV, including both standalone files and content embedded in web pages.

More on some movie stuff in a bit.

I’m a bit slow sometimes.

I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting the best resolution and such with my Samsung monitor on the new computer… then I stumbled upon the fact that I had to install the restricted stuff to get the right driver for my ATI video card. Have the booming 16801050 now… and on top of that, the visual effects is working.

So now my windows wiggle and jiggle when I move them around, I can switch to a different workspace using the scrollwheel (maybe that was something that could be done before and I just never noticed?), and I see previews of windows when using ALT-TAB to switch windows…. but I want more!

First, I had to install the advanced control panel options.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Now when I go to System | Preferences, there’s the Advanced Desktop Effects Settings option that opens the CompizConfig Settings window.

It is going to take awhile to go through all the goodies here and figure out what stuff is worthwhile, what’s just eye candy and which of each I want to keep.

I bought myself a Christmas present today. I was looking at TVs, wanting to make the move to digital… but I’m not quite ready to plunk $6-700 for a decent LCD.

So, instead I plunk down $500 for a new computer.

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