So why Snow Leopard? Because that’s what came on this machine. I’m too cheap to purchase the upgrade personally unless I ended up having this assigned as my permanent organizationally assigned laptop. Work with what you got I say. For those of you on Lion, yes, I know that the built-in Mail.App now has archive built-in. Yippee.

Now, for Snow Leopard Mac folks. Coming from Linux (Thunderbird) and Windows (MS Outlook), local archiving of email is something I’ve done for so long, I don’t know how to manage email without it.  It seems that someone always ends up asking a question about something months or even years ago and is quickly found via archived emails, provided you have a good search tool.

Lo and behold, I was astounded to not find an Archive feature in Mac Mail.app on Snow Leopard. A quick Google search and a few forum posts and I found a solution that seems to be working well. Archive, a button for Mail.App was to ticket. A quick and easy installation that only required a restart of the Mail.app.

By default, the archive tool archives to a folder called Archive in the mail account itself. So for us IMAP folks, that’s and Archive folder on the server. What I needed was to archive to a local store so I didn’t hit my mailbox quota on the sever. In order to change this setting. Opening a terminal window I ran the following:

defaults write com.apple.mail ArchiveDestination "Local"

Then all that is needed is a restart of the Mail.app. Upon restarting the application I see that there is now an Archive button and new menu items for archiving individual messages or an entire mailbox.

Now, I can archive like the packrat I am and be happy. The best part is that the local archive mailbox is exposed to Spotlight so quick searches are fully integrated.

The Upside

Ubuntu 11.10 offers a significant improvement to the Unity experience when compared to the previous release. The improved Dash is much more useful combined with the built-in filters and additional lenses that are available. I found that I usually just hit the “Windows” key to pull up the launcher and then started typing the application name and then hit enter. I figure this was easily 80% of my typical usage rather than navigating the various menus and such.

My experience with Gnome 3 shell has been even better than Unity. This is indeed my preferred shell on Ubuntu 11.10. A number of features made this a smoother was to work for myself. First, Gnome 3 honored my settings in the Nvidia driver settings of a primary display in a multi-monitor setup. This was a key for me as when at the office I wanted my large Samsung to be my primary as it is eye level for my standing position during the day. Unity failed to honor the primary display setting relegating my laptop screen down on my desk as the primary. This was inconvenient at best. Gnome 3 won the primary display settings battle.

Gnome 3 also does not make you define the number of virtual desktops. Instead the way that desktops are added as needed is spectacular in my opinion. This flexibility is ideal for someone like me who works on a many different types of projects on a given day.

As always, the memory footprint, responsiveness and use of system resources is far better than any Windows operating systems. This has allowed me to run my primary Ubuntu OS plus more virtual machines at the same time. This has certainly been refreshing to see and monitor.

The Downside

As much as I love Ubuntu, there are a few downsides of moving from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 11.10. Primarily these are the result of using this machine as my daily driver in an environment that is fully Windows operating systems and software.

The compatibility of LibreOffice with Microsoft Office formats is still somewhat lacking. LibreOffice works great for standard spreadsheets, document and presentations. Unfortunately, I receive a few highly formatted Microsoft Word documents each week that when opened in LibreOffice fail to render properly. In fact, other than a few blocks of text visible on page 1, the rest of the pages just show empty. This is just about a deal killer as I need to be able to read and review these documents. We even attempted to convert those to PDF documents, however they still rendered oddly.

Another difficulty is the lack of a GoTo Meeting / GoTo Webinar client for Linux. We use Goto Meeting for many of our calls that are more than 2 or 3 people. To my complete surprise, there is no client for Linux. In my attempt to keep Ubuntu as my operating system, I created a Windows 7 virtual machine in VirtualBox (with the extension pack) and figured I’d pass through the audio input/output and camera. The audio and video pass-through worked fairly well, but the camera support work only sporadically and was very poor to unusable. I finally had to power on an old Dell Laptop with Windows 7 on it and an external camera to do the GoTo Meeting appointments while I looked for a work around.

Finally, managing Windows servers from Ubuntu requires a lot of Terminal Services / vSphere console sessions. Again, it seemed weird but there is no Linux client for vSphere. I figured that I would just use the web client. This worked well up until the point I wanted to view and use the VM console. I could never get the console for the web client to work in Chrome, Chromium nor Firefox. This forced me to enable and use Terminal Services to connect and manage the servers. Not too bad but the native terminal client frankly, kinda such as it lacks many basic options. I’d been using Remmina Desktop to be able to save sessions and settings and leverage screen and console advanced options. Again, I was let down as the Remmina Desktop would lock up and run-away with RAM/CPU periodically if a session was left to timeout. I still have not found a good solution here.

The Bottom Line

Now we are the decision point and I must clear my conscience and confess. The downsides are but three of the most prominent issues I ran into. They are not the only issues. However, I see those issues as mostly being issues only because of working in a Windows shop. Even so, they have proved to be disruptive and have blocked some of my productivity and ability to interact with others efficiently. (You can only ask your remote colleagues “can you see me now?” so many times at the beginning of a call before *you* become what is holding the meeting back.)

So, I’ve had no choice but to format and move back to Windows 7 as my daily driver. Oh how this pains me! The first time I logged back into Windows 7, MS Outlook and Chrome on Windows, I felt defeated. Things were so sluggish and lacking in effective control compared to my extended run with Ubuntu. Alas, it is what had to be done.

Does this mean I’m done with Linux? No, not by any means. I know that I can find ways to work around the previously mentioned issues so I can be productive while not negatively impacting the effectiveness of others. So, I’ll be keeping Ubuntu (or other distros) in a virtual machine and testing as time permits. Now that I’ve had an extended taste of Ubuntu, I really see the appeal beyond just a great platform for us geeks, but as a real alternative to the Microsoft operating system monopoly.

Now….if only MacOS would turn open-source or be able to be installed easily on commodity Intel hardware.

As always, share your thoughts and experience. Got a solution for me, let me know by posting a comment below.

I initiated a restart, some old Microsoft Windows are hard to break, and went to get a cup of coffee. Upon returning I was at the Ubuntu boot screen with the five dots, but the dots were not moving. Curiously I thought, inits are being built or something so I let it go for another 10 minutes. No joy.

After attempting to go to a console window (CTRL-ALT-F1) and still not being able to get a response, I powered off and restarted. That failed to boot further. Finally I decided to enter recovery-mode.

Upon powering up and following the BIOS screen, I held down the SHIFT key until the Grub loader menu appeared. Then I selected the recovery-mode option. This at least brought me to the recovery menu. So, long story short, I was able to determine that there was a failure during init during “load fallback graphics devices”. This got me thinking that something in the xorg.conf might be hosed. I recalled that a few days before I had saved some new settings to the config file from the NVidia setting application to account for a unique, temporary configuration. This was the first time I had rebooted since making those changes.

In the interest of at least getting booted, I moved the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak while in the recovery shell having also mounted the system volume read/write. My hope was to get the “bad” settings out of the way and hopefully some defaults would get loaded. A quick reboot later and I was greeted with the nice LightDM login screen and now able to login.

Hopefully this “emergency” work-around can help someone else in a similar boat.

Blessings!

On Twitter, users began to find that they wanted the ability to tag tweets to help in finding and categorizing information. Similar to how “d @username” started the idea of direct messages, some enterprising folks settled on the syntax of “#tagname” syntax as a means of categorizing tweets. The hashtag was born.

On Twitter.com or in your favorite Twitter client, you can search for hashtags just like keywords. Say you wanted to know about the information from the Relevant 2011 conference that just recently took place. a search for #relevant11 would list all tweets where the author included that hashtag.

This can become quite powerful for following topical discussions. Below is my list of the Top 10 hashtags for missional technology:

1. #nptech – Non-profit technology
2. #sm4np – Social Media for Non-profits
3. #4change – Technologies used for social good
4. #churchtech – Church technology
5. #citrt
6. #iccm – International Conference on Computing and Mission
7. #nten – Come on – Gotta have NTEN in the list.
8. #charity – general charity info
9. #missions – generic missions info
10. #nonprofit – generic non-profit info

• Customizing the Unity Launcher
• Change Wallpaper/Theme
• Multi-Monitor support / Nvidia
• Gnome-Shell

Customizing the Unity Launcher

The Unity interface actually is something I am enjoying although I do have a few suggestions to make it better for me, however “I” am not the community. “We” are. So, how do I make the Unity interface suit me the best. The first area I have explored is the Launcher. Like the “start bar” in Windows you can add and remove icons from the Unity Launcher.

Figure 1.

When a user application is running, its icon will be in the launcher and have a light arrow on the left side indicating the number of instances that are running. What if you have a program, that I want to put a shortcut to on the launcher. This will make it easier to start when I need it. The simplest method is to start the program. Then open the Unity Launcher, right-click the icon for your program and choose the “Keep In Launcher” option. A checkmark here indicates the item will stay in the launcher even when not running while, not check mark means it will go away when no running.

Using this same concept, you can remove items from the Launcher that have been placed there. Just right click the icon and choose the “Keep In Launcher” option and it goes away. You can always get it back through the Unity Dash.

If you have more applications in the launcher than will fit vertically, notice that they collapse into a sort of vertical carousel view that you can scroll through with your mouse.

Those icons seem a little bit too big for me. Unfortunately I could not find a way to change their size out of the box. Thanks to some quick Googling however I was able to find a solution using the CCSM (Compiz Config Settings Manager) package. I installed it via the the command line in a terminal window. Oh yeah, how do you get a terminal window? In Unity the shortcut is Ctrl-Alt-T or open the Unity Dash and type terminal. The command to install CCSM is:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Figure 2.

Alternatively you can search for compizconfig in the Ubuntu Software Center. Once installed, run CCSM. From the Unity Dash, I typed ccsm and launched it.

BIG DISCLAIMER: Don’t go monkeying around too much. You can absolutely mess things up in here. I am living proof during my testing days of 11.10 Beta 2. I am only using this to change one thing. Use at your own risk!

Scroll down to the Desktop section and find where it says Ubuntu Unity Plugin. Click the name, not the checkbox. Go to the “experimental” tab and find the option for the Launcher icon size. I like an icon size around 38 but you preference may be different.

Wallpaper

Figure 3.

Changing the wallpaper is a snap. While you can put a picture of your kids, wife, dog or anything else there are some builtin options, one that I find very nice. So in order to change the wallpaper, you need to open the appearance application. You could right click on your empty desktop and choose to change desktop background or launch “appearance” from the Unity Dash.

You’ll see the ability to change wall paper and the theme here. Notice wallpaper item with the little clock icon overlayed on it. This is cool as selecting this selects a series of wallpapers that change throughout the day. I’ve been using this wallpaper since I found it and enjoy the changes as the day goes on.

Now if I can only do this for my own set of images. Hmmmm…. I need to Google that some day.

Nvidia Multi-Monitor Support

When I installed Ubuntu 11.10, I chose to download and install restricted drivers. As such, the Nvidia drivers for my graphics card were installed and automatically enabled. However today, I am docking the laptop and want to do just what I did in Windows 7, use both the laptop screen and a large external monitor.

Figure 4.

This is where I spent way too much time getting this working but I’ll try to boil it down a bit. First things first. I docked the laptop with it being completely shutdown. Not suspended or in hibernate, but shutdown. My thought was that this was the safest thing to do since previous xorg experience gave me many headaches back in the day. Upon power up the laptop and logging in I saw that only the laptop screen was being used.

Opening the display settings, Unity dash “display”, it only saw a single monitor. Detect displays button didn’t find any others. Bummer! Browsing all applications via the Unity dash I saw the NVidia X Server Settings application for my graphics card drivers. Giving that a spin, I found that I needed to enable the second monitor in “TwinView” mode. TwinView essentially sets the geometry of a single large screen made up of both monitors.

Here are the steps as seen in Figure 4.

1. Choose the X Server Display configuration option and be sure the second monitor is detected.
2. Click and highlight the detected second monitor (Samsung Syncmaster in the example)
3. Set the Configuration: to TwinView
4. Highlight the monitor you wish to use as the primary display in this configuration.
5. Place a check in the “Make this the primary display…” checkbox
6. Click Save to X Configuration File
7. Quit
8. Reboot

Now, when I saved to the X configuration file there were some messages about not being able to merge, etc… I plowed through and got it to save.

Upon rebooting, I logged in to find both monitors working. I was able to drag windows from one monitor to the other. Now I figured it was time to undock and see what happened. I tried several ways of undocking, hot, suspended, logged in, logged out and they all resulted in the same outcome. When undocking, the removal of the large monitor did not change the way the X server displayed the screen. It kept the same large geometry rather than detecting the now missing monitor and re-configuring the screens. This was definitely a big disappointment.

Figure 5.

Finally, I enable the ability to restart the X-server via a hot-key combination. This keyboard shortcut is disabled by default but enabling it easy.

1. Open the keyboard settings (Unity dash or System settings).
2. Select the ‘Layout settings’ and then “Options”
3. Select “Key sequence to kill the X server” and enable “Control + Alt + Backspace”.

Gnome 3 / Gnome-shell

Figure 6.

After getting the bare minimum working with a multi-monitor setup, I quickly realize that the Unity desktop does not correctly honor the setting of a primary display as configured in the NVidia tools. After some quick looking, I also realized the Gnome 3 shell is only a command away and “stable”.  I figured I would give Gnome 3 a try and truthfully it just looked cool. (Hey, I’m a technology geek. Give me a break.) Thanks to the Ubuntu and Gnome teams for getting this in the standard repositories!

Off to the Ubuntu Software center and search for gnome shell. Alternatively it can be installed from the command.

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

Now, once it completes the installation you’ll want to logout or reboot. When back at the login screen you can now alternative between the Gnome shell or Ubuntu Unity interfaces. When logging in, click the gear icon next to you name and choose Gnome to use the Gnome shell and choose Ubuntu to use Unity.

Now once in the Gnome shell, you’ll see things are fairly minimalistic by default. My desktop is completely empty. Fear not! First thing I did was to read through the Gnome shell cheat sheet here. Also, there is a great overview on OMB Ubuntu here.

So here is what I really like:

Desktops

Unlike Unity, the number of desktops is not predefined. Instead, you start with two desktops. As you move applications to the first and second desktops, a third empty desktop is automatically available. Move an app to the third desktop and automatically a fourth desktop is available. The desktop are all scrolled up and down, up, down, left and right. This allows for very quick scrolling through desktops. Additionally, in a dual monitor setup, the primary monitor houses the desktops, while the second monitor is a singular, not rotating desktop. This allows you have have say Thunderbird open all the time on the second monitor while scrolling through all the other desktops on the primary monitor. I love this feature.

Multi-Monitor Support

Gnome 3 shell, unlike Unity, actually honors the setting for the Nvidia “set as primary display”. Unity always made my laptop screen the primary no matter what the setting was in the Nvidia settings. Gnome shell on the other hand, honors the setting. This allows me to be docked and actually use my large 26″ monitor as the primary with all the bells and whistles of being the default monitor.

 Notifications and Messaging

Notifications in Gnome shell pop up in the bottom center of the primary monitor. These typically are a title only. Moving you mouse over the notification opens it to read the full notification details. Again, I like this more than the box pop-up in Unity. It allows for me to see the notification without it covering a potentially used area of the screen.

Opening the name menu you can toggle off/on all notifications at once. Again, this is a feature I fine I am using quite a bit already every time I do a presentation of web meeting. It is nice to be able to quickly turn these on or off. Same goes for empathy as there is a way to set your presence in the this same menu. If I had one nit here, it is that every time I log in, the empathy status sets itself to “unavailable” regardless of what the setting was when I last logged out.

That finishes things up. I’ll run with this for a while and see what else pops up.

• The peak time for social sharing is 9:30am EST daily.
• Wednesday is the peak day of the week for sharing.
• 75% of sharing clicks happen on the first day of the share.
• Most users click within 2 minutes of the share. (Wow!)
• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Tumblr are on the rise
• iGoogle, AOL Lifestream, MySpace, Delicious and Digg are on the way out [my words]
• 10x more sharing occurs via URL copy-n-paste than from sharing tools

Visit http://www.jamtour.com for more informat

Nope, This is not a technology piece. Instead, let’s hear from all your music freaks! The organization I’m with during the day is helping to sponsor the 2012 Winter Jam tour. This tour is split with one line-up for the Western and another for the Eastern U.S. Here is a list of some of the talent that will be on stage (as of this writing)

Check out the tour dates, grab some friends and make your plans to attend! While your at it, YOU can help Bible Poverty. Check it out at http://endbiblepoverty.org

Is that really it? oh Hi there. You caught me in mid thought. I came across the gdgt.com site today and this is exactly what the site says. “Reviews from people who actually know”. Ok, I’ll bite. Always looking for a good Android phone with an unlocked bootloader, I typed the question:

what is the best android with an unlocked bootloader

I clicked the find answers button and got to the results page. Exciting! Oh wait, no. Not so exciting after all. No results. I guess I expect Google like language parsing but perhaps not so here. So, the 30 seconds I spent so far have not impressed. I figure I should give them the benefit of the doubt and register for an account to see what else is available. Oh look, Facebook Connect. I’ll do that to make this quick and then turn off the authorization in a bit.

Nope! Can you say #fail? Upon authorizing the service to facebook I was told I already had a gdgt account. Hmmm. Really? Ok, gave my usual throw away password and received the following “success” message. {success:true}. Boy thanks. I really appreciate that affirmation message.

Well, in all seriousness, us technology folks know that it is just that, technology and stuff happens. Hopefully they get things worked out soon and we can see what this site offers or doesn’t compared to so many other question and answer sites.

• Microsoft Access / No equivalent
• Remote Desktop / Remmina
• Banshee / Android Sync

Microsoft  Access

Day 3 provided a challenge. Today, I received a call from a staff person with a problem in our one remaining Access DB application front-end. This application contains linked tables, forms, queries and a bunch of VBA code. On a lark, I attempted to open the application in LibreOffice Base. Immediately it failed. I tried a number things, but alas, LibreOffice Base is not a drop in replacement for Microsoft Access.

As a result, I resorted to using remote desktop services / terminal services we run for remote access for some of our staff. From my remote desktop session, I am able to use Microsoft Access and could resolve the problem that has been reported to me by the user.

Remote Desktop / Terminal Services Client

Figure 1.

So how did I connect to remote desktop services from Ubuntu? The Ubuntu team made this easy on us. Opening the Unity Dash and type “remote”. You will see the “Remote Viewer” application. This allows you to connect to SSH and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) sessions from Ubuntu. Opening the application, I set the protocol to RDP, entered the RDP server hostname and entered my username. Upon clicking connect, my session began.

I found that while Remote Viewer works well for what it is intended to do, that I might want some of the additional features of the native Microsoft Terminal Services Client. So I headed to the Ubuntu Software center and did a search for ‘rdp’. I found the Remmina Remote Desktop Client. It has a rating of five stars so I thought I’d give it a shot. After installing and launching this application I found that I could create multiple saved connects along with some of the following advanced features:

• Connect to console
• Client or custom resolution
• Dekstop scaling
• Color Depth
• Shared (passthrough) folder selection
• Quality options
• Clipboard Synchronization
• and more…

Music / Android Sync

Figure 2.

Now that productivity has been met so far, it is time to start getting a little bit more comfortable. For me, that means music. My range of music varies greatly and is quite eclectic. If I’m studying it may be Chopin or Beethoven. Instropection may mean David Crowder, Benton Brown, Aaron Shust. Coding means rocking out to some Skillet, Disciple, Red, Thousand Foot Krutch and others. So what does Ubuntu 11.10 have to offer for music players? Banshee.

Banshee is the default music player in this release of Ubuntu. Starting the application I saw an unremarkable interface that is fairly intuitive. The first thing I needed to do what to get my music files I had restored on Day 1 into Banshee. Now, I put all my music files/folders into the Music folder in my home directory. As such, all I had to do what choose Rescan Music Library from the Tools menu. If the music files are elsewhere I can use Media –> Import Media and select the location of the media to import.

Right away I noticed that after importing the media files, Banshee was automatically going and getting album art for the albums. The Tools menu continue to call to me. Noticing that there was a menu item there to “fix music metadata” another nicety was found. There were built-in tools to remove duplicate Albums, Artists and genres.

While listening to some of my new found music bliss, I did a bit of reading about Banshee and some of the plugins available. That led me to install the community extensions from the terminal command line:

sudo apt-get install banshee-community-extensions

This package includes extensions like downloading song lyrics, alarm clock, stream recorder, clutterflow and more. Finally hit CTRL+E and the equalizer pops up. Enabling this and trying some the presets seemed to be over-driven in the pre-amp setting on my laptop. I needed to create a custom preset and reduce the pre-amp to get a decent sound.

Finally it was time to connect my Motorol Droid X android phone to see how the music sync would work. Unfortunately Banshee did not see it as a portable music device that could be synchronized. Determined that an android device should work better with Linux than Windows, off to Google I ran. After several minutes I came across this article. Essentially I had to create a file in the root of my sdcard on the phone called .is_audio_player with the following contents:

audio_folders=sdcard/music/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mpeg,audio/mp3,audio/x-aac

Once this was done, I disconnect and then reconnected the phone via the usb cable. Immediately Banshee recognized the device and I was able to setup synchronization with the device.

Now that my music craving had been satisfied, it was time to rock out and get some work done. Tomorrow I’ll customize things a bit more to my new operating system.

The technology behind Square allow business owners in the U.S. to accept credit card payments without requiring the purchase of bulky or expensive credit card terminals. Inserting the Square device into the headphone jack of your iOS or Android device allows for swiping of the patron’s credit or debit card.

While the device is available to be ordered free online at squareup.com BusinessWeek recently ran a story indicating that Walmart, the nations largest retailer, will begin selling the device for $9.99, which can then be refunded online through use of the Square service. Business owners pay a 2.75% fee on each transaction for use of the service.

As an interesting note. My church used this service during the offering this past week as part of a special week to provide funding for specific local and internal mission projects. During the offertory, our praise and worship team was at the back of the sanctuary with their iPhones, allowing for spirit led giving. Interesting for sure. It makes me wonder about the potential viability for this tool at events for non-profits and mission organizations.