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!

• 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.

• 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.

• Convert Outlook archive .pst’s to Thunderbird.
• Libre Office Write and Calc
• Fix default application for Office 2007+ formats
• Windows network shares

Outlook .pst files to Thunderbird

Moving from Windows 7 and Microsoft Outlook to Ubuntu and Thunderbird does have a few challenges. One of those is that if you had local .pst files for local message and archive stores in Outlook, Thunderbird can’t understand them. Thankfully I had already tackled this a few weeks ago as I new it was something I would need to conquer if I was going to make the switch.

So as not to double post, I will refer you to the detailed article I already wrote regarding the procedure here.

Figure 1.

Once the conversion process completed there were a few quirky things that popped up. One issue was that when doing a search across all email I would get results from long ago. When I clicked the aged result the email would not come up. Funny, I thought. After a bit of playing I found a solution.

While in Thunderbird, I found that if I right-clicked on one of those archived yearly folder and went into the properties there were some interesting options. The one that helped me was to choose the “Repair Folder” option. This would take 15-20 seconds to complete on some of the folders but when done, I could view the old email messages in the search results without issue.

Libre Office Write and Calc

If you come from the Microsoft World, you are most likely coming from the use of the Microsoft Office suite of products as well, including MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Access and more. In the the 11.10 version of Ubuntu you will find the Libre Office suite already installed.

If you are not already aware, here is the breakdown of equivalence:

MS Word        ->    Libre Writer
MS Excel       ->    Libre Calc
MS PowerPoint  ->    Libre Impress
MS Paint?      ->    Libre Draw
MS Access      ->    Libre Base (not exactly, but kinda)

Again, thinking about my immediate productivity, I need to see about equivalents for MS Word and Excel. As such, it’s time to review compatibility of LibreOffice Writer and Calc.

We have a mixed use environment of Microsoft Office versions. We have MS Word files in both .doc and .docx formats. For Excel we have .xls and .xlsx formats. If I’ll be communicating and working with other office staff, all on Windows 7 and using Microsoft Office tools, I need to ensure they never know I’m using another tool.

So, I open the nautilus file manager and navigate to my Home folder. Down into Documents I dive looking through those wonderfully restored files from day 1. Aha! I spy a .xls spreadsheet that I know has multiple linked worksheets. Double click and it is opening in LibreOffice Calc. A quick review of numbers, linked cells and all and everything looks good.Changed some cells, saved and I was prompted on whether to keep in the current format or change to ODF. If I want MS Office users to be able to open it, I better keep the current format. Finally I sent the spreadsheet to a colleague, with the warning that more are coming, so they could test opening them in MS Excel and make sure all is right with the world.

Next I needed to do the same things with an .xlsx format. Double click and what’s this? Archive Manager? Yup, for some reason the Archive Manager was attempting to open my .xslx files. After a bit of poking around I realized that for some reason the Archive Manager was set as the default application for .xslx files.

Figure 2.

This was easy enough to fix. In Nautilus file manager I right clicked on a .xslx file and chose the properties menu item.

From there [see Figure 2.] you will notice that the Archive Manager application is currently set to the default for this file type. Click and highlight the LibreOffice Calc option and then click the Set as default button.

Doing this changes the default file association for .xslx files. From now on, double-clicking an .xslx file will result in the file opening automatically in LibreOffice Calc.

I found that the same problem existing with .docx files as well. The same fix, only this time selecting LibreOffice Writer as the default, solved the issue.

As I went through various .doc(x) and .xls(x) files, all of which are fairly straight forward, no massive macros or VBA code, everything looked good. My colleague, who was by now tired of receiving and testing files, found no issue either. Phew! That’s another one off the list.

Windows File Shares

Working in a Microsoft Windows shop, there are plenty of network file shares on Windows servers. I’ll need to be able to get to all those mapped drives and shares also. Again Ubuntu makes this pretty straight forward. Windows file shares are accessed via SMB protocol. Like most things, there is more than one way to get to those file shares. One is to use Nautilus and browse the network to find and access those resources. Another is to go directly to them is you know the path to the shares. In my case, I chose the latter.

Figure 3.

Opening Nautilus, I chose the “Go” menu item and selected “Location”. In the location bar I typed SMB:// and then the UNC path the network resource I wanted to access.

smb://servername/sharename

Doing so and hitting the enter key then prompted me for my Windows credentials. I entered my Active Directory user name, domain name and password. You can then select how long those credentials are used. At this point I selected the “Remember password until you logout” option. You can make you own assessment of what is right for you.

Figure 4.

Now that I have access the file share, I want to bookmark it so I can quickly get back to this location. Again in Nautilus, I chose the Bookmarks menu item and then Add Bookmark (Ctrl + D). This adds the current location to the bookmark menu. Now, to make it a friendly name, right clicked the bookmark and chose the rename option. Since some of these corresponded to mapped drives in the Windows world, I gave some of the bookmarks single letter names to match the previously drive map letters.

Rinse and repeat as my ladies would say.

Day 2 is getting along fine. No major failures or inability to be productive. So far so good. Tomorrow I’ll play with customizing the environment a bit to personal tastes and anything else that comes up.

• Backup Windows 7 personal files using CrashPlan
• Install Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit with separate partitions for / and /home
• Restored personal files using Crashplan to my Ubuntu home directory
• Configured Thunderbird for IMAP/SMTP
• Fell in love with Thunderbird search and filters

Now, in order to complete the immediate productivity need two more important things are needed. Calendaring and Skype.

Calendars

Next to email, keeping up with tasks and appointments is quite important to day to day operations here. Funny enough, our organization does not have a shared calendaring system, so we spend time asking each other when we are each free to meet. I use our email service calendaring functionality for my office calendar. Additionally, I use Google calendar for my personal calendaring needs.

From previous experience, I know that Thunderbird does not natively handle calendaring, but a few options exist. One option is to use a standalone calendaring application such as Sunbird from the Mozilla project. Another option is to use the Lightning plugin for Thunderbird. There are other options as well, but since I am attempting to use default tools, I’ll stick with these for the moment. I chose to try the Lightning plug-in so I could potentially have email and calendar in one place. The result? I was fairly happy with the results.

Figure 1.

Adding the lightning plug-in should be little different than finding and adding an add-on to FireFox. From Thunderbird, Choose Tools –> Add-on’s –> Get Add-ons. Search for “Lightning”.

This is where my first problem came up. Lightning was not listed in the results, so I scrolled to the bottom of the results and clicked the link that said “See all 31 results”. This took me to the Mozilla project add-ons website. There I did a search for Lightning and immediately found the plugin. I clicked the Add to Thunderbird button and then restarted Thunderbird.

Figure 2.

Now that the Lightning add-on is installed, the calendars need to be configured. For our corporate calendaring functionality we use CalDAV. This is straight forward to do provided you know the URL to our CalDAV calendar. If you don’t know, ask you email administrator.

While in Thunderbird, I opened the calendar tab from the “Events and Tasks” menu item. Then I right-clicked in the calendar selection pane on the left side of the window and chose “New Calendar”. Since this calendar is not local but on the email server, I chose the “on Network” rather than “on Computer” option. Then I selected CalDAV as the calendar format and pasted the URL to my calendar on the server. Note that the “Read Only” box is empty. This allows for reading and writing of my corporate calendar events. Finally, clicked Ok and the calendar immediately began to populate with appointments.

Figure 3.

Also, I would like to view my personal Google Calendar along-side my corporate calendar so I don’t inadvertently schedule a conflict between work and personal events. (The Mrs. does not like that!)

Again, this is fairly painless. First I need the URL for my Google calendar’s private XML feed. This will allow bi-directional read/write for my calendar. Logging into Google calendar, I chose account settings, then calendar settings and then clicked on the name of my calendar. That takes me to a page [Like figure 3]. Scroll down and select the XML feed button under the Private Address section. This is the URL to use.

Figure 4.

Now back in Thunderbird, on the Calendar tab I again right clicked in the left column of the calendar selection pane and choose new calendar. This calendar is not local and is on the network (the internet) so I chose the “on Network” option. This time I chose the Google Calendar as the format and then pasted the private XML address I just copied from my Google calendar settings. Then the ok button is clicked and my personal calendar begins to populate the calendar. Now I can toggle on an off each calendar in the left pane or leave them both selected to see all items both work and personal. Way to go Thunderbird/Lightning.

You will also note that there is also a “Home” calendar by default. This is a local only calendar but is the default for all events and tasks. Be sure to select the correct calendar in the event when creating new items to get it placed on the right calendar. If you make a mistake, I found that you can open the appointment and change the calendar it should belong to. Doing this will move it to the correct calendar. This is a great feature!

Skype

Figure 5.

Ah yes, Skype. Love it and hate it.  We use it a lot with remote staff and thankfully it will work on Ubuntu 11.10. This one is again fairly painless to install.

From the Unity Dash, click the Ubuntu Software Center icon. From the software center, search for skype. I was prompted to enable the Canonical Partners repository. Then it was a simple matter of clicking install and waiting for the installation to complete.

After Skype was installed, I opened the Unity dash and began typing ‘s-k-y’ and the Skype icon appeared. Clicking it (or hitting the enter key) started the application. Logging in, I set my preferences and placed a test call to ensure audio was working. I did need to make a little adjustment in the microphone settings to increase the level but all was good after that.

Figure 6.

Now, I noticed that there was no option to set Skype to automatically start when I logged in. Curious enough. This was easy to solve. Again I opened the Unity dash and found the “Startup Applications” launcher. Opening this I added a new item.

1. Click the Add button
2. Name: Skype
3. Command: skype

That’s it. Now when I log in, Skype will automatically start-up. That saves me from forgetting many times and getting that email saying “I didn’t see you online in Skype so….”

That does it for day 1. Tomorrow I will work on converting my old Microsoft .pst archives into a format that Thunderbird can understand and check out Libre Office as my replacement for the Microsoft Office suite.

>> Next: Day 2

The machine I am using is a Dell Latitude E6510 with 4GB RAM, 320GB HD, Processor: Intel® Core™ i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz × 8  and graphics card: NVS 3100M/PCI/SSE2. As such, I am installing the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 11.10.

My first step was to make a backup of my Windows 7 machine personal files. My organization uses CrashPlan Pro Enterprise which is really a fantastic product for client machine backups. [Maybe a review is in order] The regular version is free for personal backup use as of this writing. The Crashplan client is available for Mac, Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris.

How to Backup to an attached Drive – Crashplan

I backed up My Documents and My Pictures folders and all of my local Microsoft Outlook .pst files to an external hard drive. I figured that if I was going to do this, I’d go all in so I used the external hard drive as I planned to fully format my existing laptop internal drive. [Talk about committed.]

Installation

After backing up my most important files, I downloaded the Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit .iso image and then created a bootable CD using CDBurnerXP.

I booted up from an Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD I had created *before* I left Windows 7. Upon booting the Live CD, I chose the Install Ubuntu option and followed the prompts.

I chose a custom disk configuration, “something else” from the how to install screen, so that the /home mount point would be a separate partition. This comes from previous experience.

By having the /home mount point on a separate partition from the / mount point, I could reinstall the system if needed, without losing all of my personal documents and settings. Not Windows registry to get gunked up in Linux.As an example, all my Thunderbird email, account settings and preferences are all stored in the .thunderbird folder of my home directory. If I ever needed to move Thunderbird to another machine, I could bring that folder over and be up an running quickly.

During the installation setup,also also chose the options for installing updates as well as the 3rd party software as part of the installation.

Away ran the Ubuntu installer. I anxiously watched the informative “ads” touting the virtues of Ubuntu 11.10. Finally I was prompted to reboot and remove the installation media. A few minutes later and I was ready to login.

Upon my first login I saw the updated Unity interface. Now, there are some verse diverse and strongly held opinions on the Unity interface versus Gnome and Gnome 3 (gnome-shell). I have no desire to get into that fray. I for one will go with what I like the most and provides me alone with the best usability on the platform. The folks over at OMG! Ubuntu! have a number of good articles including this one that show you some of the changes or help orient you to the Unity interface.

Knowing that I needed to be able to be productive at the office the following morning I prioritized what to setup first.

Updates

Just in case you forgot to check the box to download and apply updates during the installation, you should check for and apply updates. There are a number of way to do this. You could press the “super” key (Windows Key) and then type “update”. Select the update manager.

Alternatively you could click the “power” icon in the upper right hand corner and see if “Updates are Available”. If so, click to launch the update manager.

Be sure to click the “Check” button first to ensure you have the latest cache of what updates are needed. Then click “Install Updates”.

If you prefer, you could use the command line in a terminal window instead:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Once every is updated, you may need to reboot if instructed to. Otherwise, you can continue to work. This my dear friend is one of the beauties of Linux.

Restore

My first priority was to restore my documents, files and email archives so I could reference them. I used the default Firefox browser to download the Crashplan client. After extracting the contents using the built-in archive manager, I ran the ./install.sh installation script and took all of the default responses to the script questions.

This placed the Crashplan icon on my desktop. Double clicking the icon start the client user interface. From this point I restored my backed up files and folders to appropriate places in my home directory. My Documents contents went into the Documents folder. My Pictures folder contents were restored to the Pictures folder. Finally I create a new folder in my home directory called “temp”. I then restored all my Microsoft Outlook .pst files into the temp folder.

Email Setup

Much of my day revolves around email. As such, I had to get email setup and running quickly. In Ubuntu 11.10 the default email client is now Thunderbird, replacing the previous Evolution default. Our mail server support POP3, SMTP, IMAP and MAPI. Thunderbird does not support MAPI. As such, I had decided upon an IMAP setup. To my surprise as I walked through the Thunderbird setup wizard, the IMAP and SMTP mail server settings were detected and setup automatically.

Immediately my inbox sprung to life. A quick send of a test message to a personal mail account proved that SMTP mail sending was also working. Now it was time to setup a few preferences. First, our organization asks us to use a standard common HTML signature for our outgoing emails. In Thunderbird from the Edit menu, choose Account Settings. Find the option for “Use HTML” and check the box. Then copy and paste the HTML for the signature. Click OK and I was done.

Now I had functioning email. One feature I immediately fell in love with was the ability to search all email folders for keywords at once. Goodbye Outlook! Once you type in the search terms in the search box you are presented the results page. This is where I fell in love. The interface easily allows you to further refine your results by pre-defined filters, people, folders, accounts, tags and even year, month and day. Filtering allows for both positive and negative filtering. i.e. All email from Tom or all emails except from Tom . This I think is far and above Microsoft Outlook.

Now that my precious email services were working, I needed to finish getting calendars and services setup in order to ensure I am able to work tomorrow….

>> Next – Day 1 Part 2

After a bit of poking around, I found that somehow the archive manage was now set as the default application for a .docx file. I did this by navigating to a .docx file in the file manager (Nautilus) and right-clicking it and then selecting “Properties”. Then select the “Open With” tab. You can see in the image below that the Archive Manager was set as the default application.

Archive Manager set as default application for .docx

So, the fix was quite simple. I selected LibreOffice Writer and then clicked the “Set as Default” button.

LibreOffice Writer is now our default application for this file type.

Excellent. Now go and double-click on a .docx file and you should see it open correctly in LbreOffice Writer. Ok, with that now working, go celebrate with a cup of java (extra bold, no sugar, no cream)

The change I made was to once again go down the road of running Linux as my primary operating system. This time it was Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit. However this article is not about the operating system, it is about the process I used to get my backed up local .PST files created by Microsoft Outlook to give up those precious emails so I could refer to them in my new email client, Mozilla Thunderbird.

There are plenty of articles you can Google that talk about the best process to make this happen. It tends to be along the lines of installing Thunderbird on a Windows machine that also has Microsoft Outlook installed along with your .pst files. In this setup, you can supposedly use the built-in Thunderbird import feature which makes calls to Outlook to get at your emails. In my case, I didn’t want to have to try and go through that time consuming process.

Instead I ended up using a Linux package to extract the emails, renamed all the files and imported them all using a Thunderbird plugin. So, let’s get to the details.

Step 1 – Get your email out of the .pst files.

Install the readpst package.

sudo apt-get install readpst

Now create the directory where you will want the extract email files to be placed.

mkdir pst-export

Next execute the readpst command against a .pst file.

readpst -D -M -b -o pst-export archive.pst

Step 2 – Rename exported files

The readpst command will export all your emails into a folder hierarchy that matches the previous folder hierarchy in Outlook. The only problem is that every email is exported as a numeric filename. The text document are .eml files but don’t have the .eml extension. Therefore, we need to recursively rename all the email files to add the .eml extension. Lots of other articles will have you create bash, python, perl or other scripts to do this. I actually found the easiest to be a single command line.

find . -type f ! -iname '*.eml' -exec rename 's/([0-9]+)$/$1.eml/' {} \;

What we are doing is finding all items that are files and do not already have a .eml extension. When we find these, we rename the file by adding the .eml extension.

NOTE: Depending on how many emails you have to rename, this is not the fastest approach and may run quite a while.

Step 3 – Import .eml files into Thunderbird

It’s now time to import all those email files into Thunderbird to make them useful. I found that what worked best for me was to install the ImportExportTools plugin for Thunderbird and use it to bring everything in.

Once you have installed the plugin it is time to use the tool. Inside Thunderbird, create a temporary local folder that we will use to house this mass of emails that you can later do what you please to get them where you want for their final location in Thunderbird.

Right click the folder in Thunderbird and choose the following menu path

import/export –> import all eml files from a directory –> also from its subdirectories

Then choose the folder you exported all the .pst emails tools (pst-export). Now sit back and wait while all your lovely emails you missed so much are made an active part of your new Thunderbird installation. Go get another cup of coffee and maybe a snack as this too will take a little bit to complete and you’re done.

During a quick break today, I found the this forum post that got me trying a couple things.

First I ensured the the bcmwl-kernel-source package was removed.

sudo apt-get remove bcmwl-kernel-source

Next I installed the firmware-b43-installer package.

sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

Immediately, the Wi-Fi indicator on the laptop began to glow. Two minutes later I had configured the wireless settings and was connected, browsing the internet without a cable.

Thought I’d post these two lines as a reminder to myself and hopefully a help to others.

Blessings