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.

Ok, I’ve slowly been working on getting more stuff working with Ubuntu on my main system. Tonight, it’s the LG lightscribe DVD burner.

Just before dumping WinXP, I found the LightScribe official site, and had noticed they had Linux versions of a few things. So tonight I got back and end up on the Linux download page and find they have a Debian version of the system software package. I click to download… open it… and the package just kicks in.

When it’s done, I go back and grab the Simple Labeler, The -deb file again. I used the template labeler on WinXP, so we’ll see how different this is. Nothing was installed to my Applications menu. I browse to the opt folder, there’s a new lightscribeApplications folder, and in there SimpleLabeler. Start it up, and grab a CD to test it out with.

Simple Labeler does.. simple labels. A graphical ring around the hub area with a top and/or bottom area of text. After typing some jibberish in, selecting the paw prints graphic, it does a preview and I click the print button. Then after a couple minutes of media detecting… the tray pops out and it asks me to insert a compatible disk, label side down. Hmmm? ok. I pull the disk out, put it back in, close the tray and click OK. It starts chugging along… two minutes later it pops it out again… and whoa, it worked!

Next step, a quick Google search finds this page on the Ubuntu Forums - it explains a lot of what I just did, but has the added bonus of a link to a program called LaCiE LightScribe Labeler for Linux, or 4L - someone made a Deb package you can grab. It installed to my /usr folder. I haven’t tested it yet, but the look is very similar to the Template Labeler off the LightScribe site… except after looking at it for a few minutes, you can not add text to the label.

Basically, 4L seems to take an image and print that image only, as either a title band (narrow, a bit inside from the center hub), a content band (from hub out to the same layer as the title band), or full disk. If you want text, you have to put it in your image first. So… the search for something else will continue, but this will do for now.

Actually, the LightScribe site has some great graphics you can download (here and here), and I had already figured I could use them as templates for my own images if needed. So maybe for what little work I actually do with the labeling, this could work for now.