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.

There is a lot of bantering going on, from smaller blogs on up to the biggies, about how Ubuntu is the becoming generic name for Linux in much the same way all facial tissues are Kleenix, and all those peel and stick bandages are a Band-Aid.

One blog,  recently opened up with the following…

Linux is small enough. Let’s face it, most computer users don’t even know about Linux, let alone know what Ubuntu is. However, among new Linux users, Ubuntu is quickly becoming synonymous with Linux. And that is a shame.

I would disagree with that statement, and the author was even nice enough to give me a reason why in his next statement.

Linux has a breadth and depth to it that is hard to fathom for new users.

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I use Firefox for my browser when ever humanly possible. I have installed on my Windows box at work and on my Windows based laptop. Of course it is on my Ubuntu boxes here at home. I even keep the portable version on my thumbdrive.

If you use Firefox, good for you. If you don’t… why not? You should be. And just another reason to do so is the add-ons available. I am not a power-user by any stretch, but there are some that I use that really do make my browsing life easier… and I’m going to share a couple with you now, and more over the coming days. (don’t want to overwhelm you after all.)

I am not going to get in to any real depth here, I just want to point out these things out and give you my basic impressions as to why I use it.

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Ok, I have things up and running. I’ll talk about some software things soonly, but first I am having issues with my monitors. I have an nVidia 128k AGP card with a 19″ CRT and a 256K ATI Radeon9250 PCI card with my Samsun SyncMaster 2232BW.

I haven’t seem to get a dual screen setup going. Everything defaulted to the CRT, couldn’t get anything on the LCD.

I futzed around and did some different things I read about online in modifying the config file… and managed to screw things up at least three times. Now, I’m running on the LCD

Now… and I’m now sure how… but I am running on the LCD at 1440×900.

Will have to find a forum to post about all this on and see what I can come up with.

Alright, I installed Ubuntu on my main desktop.

It didn’t take too long, at 10:50 I disabled my secondary drive and external drive, put the Live CD I made awhile back in, booted up the computer. Bout 10 minutes later it was running off the CD and I started the install. I didn’t need to partition the drive before, and I’m not entirely sure I understand what I did in the install here. I need to investigate the partition and file setup Ubuntu uses more.

After a formatting and installing, I rebooted about 10:38 and a couple minutes later I had logged and was downloading updates. My disk was the previous version, so there were lots of updates, bout 11:02 was when it restarted. So… just under an hour to install and be usable. If I counted the time to DL the current version and burn a new CD, not sure if I would have saved any time. Though I’ll probably DL and burn a new iso to have on hand.

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Ok, I spent most of Friday evening and yesterday archiving a bunch of old files to spare hard drives with my usb-ide cable. A 20gig drive has all the old files that I know I haven’t touched in forever. Old versions of websites, old documents, etc. Also dumped all my “my programs” stuff where I keep copies of programs I download to try. That pretty much filled that up and then it was all deleted from my D drive.

Moved all my photos to a 15gig drive - I may put them back on the hard drive once the switch is over, we’ll see. Copied all my MP3s to a 10gig - I’ll figure a way to back up my music to this drive every once in awhile from now on.

Defragged the D drive, it’s a 120gig that’s about 1/3 full at the moment. My external 120, Z drive will get formatted and ready for new backups once I’ve settled in.

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