Making the transistion from Windows to Linux

For those of you reading this blog who have not yet made the transition from the world of Windows (or Mac OS) to Linux yet, I thought It was time I got down to some practical articles about making the move, and particularly what software I use in Linux that replaces common Windows/Mac applications.

Lets be realistic, these days the most common use for a PC in most households is surfing the internet and social media. Have no fear on this score, Linux has versions of all the main Web browsers, Firefox, Opera and Chrome, it is even possible to get Internet Explorer working in Linux through WINE, but that is for another day.

The screen shot shows Firefox running in my install of Mint 11. In all the new user friendly distributions of Linux, Surfing the internet, watching 'U Tube' video, and accessing your web mail, and social media sites is a simple as it is in Windows. In some distributions you may need to add the flash plug-in the first time you try and run a video but this only takes a few minutes and your up and running. With Mint you will not even have to do that.

OK so we can access the internet, lets look at the next most common use for a home PC, opening documents such as those produced in Microsoft Office. Letters Spreadsheets and Power Point presentations. Bring on LibreOffice.

This is a fully functional (and powerful) Office application suit. It includes applications for producing, Word, Spreadsheet and presentation documents, it can also open and save to the Microsoft Office equivalent formats including the later versions such as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx. It also can open documents from other more obscure office applications such as those created in Microsoft Works as I recently found out when I was sent a document created with this package. As well as word documents the other common format that is often sent or downloaded is those in Portable Document Format (pdf) fear not Linux has several tools that can view these documents, and LibreOffice can even create pdf documents for you to send to others without the worry they will change it in any way.   

So we have software in Linux that can do some common tasks that you may already be doing in Windows. The difference is that LibreOffice will not cost you the £100+ that MS Office will cost you. If you want to give it a go there is a Windows version, you can download it here:

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

In the next Blog I'll look at Music and Video play back in Linux.

Blackpool Linux Use Group - Todays meeting

Well as usual Saturday morning was filled with geeky goodness in the form of the regular Blackpool LUG. This morning we did quite a bit.

I helped my fellow member configure Hangout video conferencing in Google+ as he wanted to make sure it was all in working order in preparation for an interview he will be having in cyberspace on Monday evening,

Good luck to you Les.

Les also provided us with some goodies in the form of some new stickers to adorn our various bits of tec, these are of the new LUG 'Special Projects Group' logo that has been designed for us, and also the #geekupthetower Logo for the Blackpool Geekup group.

My self and Arron were fooling around making Ascii Art using figlet to then paste into the new RIC chat room we have running.

Simon a new member of the group was testing out his battery on his Aser Aspire One Net Book to see if it was duff or worse the charger circuit had failed, as it turned out it was the Battery, while not cheap to replace, a far simpler fix than the alternative. Simon also put the new Beta of Ubuntu 12.04 onto the Acer and was having 'fun' trying to get to grips with the UNITY interface.

I've said it here before, I feel these type of desk top environments are very well suited to touch screen devices, but PC's that use a keyboard and mouse not so good. (Me, an old stick in the mud, Never!!!)  

Finally as you can see from the pictures I was shown how to put images into a Blog post.

 

How lucky I am to use Linux

As this post is supposed to be about Linux this will not be a long Blog but I just wanted to let my readers know how lucky I feel to have discovered Linux when I did. Occasionally I do a little freelance computer work repairing family and friends PC's (to say I'm freelance generally means 'free') as they know I have some knowledge and can fix simple hardware issues and reinstall Windows if needed.

Well last week a work mate asked if I would look at a laptop with Windows XP installed on it that was full of viruses, the task being to rescue the data and do a reinstall of Windows. Once I had my hands on the PC I booted it up with a Live image of Linux Mint 11 just to make sure all the hardware was working, which it was, and while in Linux I copied all the data that needed to be saved onto an external Hard drive.

That's when the fun started, I reinstalled Windows but it has taken me 2 days to find all the necessary drivers, partially as Toshiba have not put the correct LAN driver on the download site and having installed windows XP SP3 before I activated the sound driver, I found that this would not work with SP3 installed unless the driver has been installed with the SP2 instillation which is what the PC came with originally. This resulted in having to do the reinstall twice. At least the second time around I had all the divers so was able to do the whole job in about  4-5 hours, including copying the data back to the PC after virus checking it in both Linux and with MS security essentials.

If I had been doing a fresh install of Linux Mint on the same PC I would have had a fully installed and updated machine in less than 2 Hours.

Hence my gratitude to having found Linux

Linux Mint 12 cont

A couple of weeks ago I posted here that I had downloaded Mint 12 into Virtual box and was going to see how the new interface worked now they have moved to Gnome 3.2. Unfortunately due to issues with VB and the new Gnome interface I was not able to get it fully working as it should so was not in a position to really make any comments.

However Yesterday I installed the Distribution release onto a Toshiba R500 dual core laptop I have as one of my portable solutions. I'll not go through the install process there are a number of good videos on U tube showing this, one is to be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ULPs8R6Wl0

I like the the mint interpretation of the Gnome 3.x desktop but I still have some issues in that I do not seem to be able to create desktop or panel short cut icons to lunch an application, I have to go to the menu to find it. if this is not in the favourites bar then this can take a moment or 2 before your able to launch the application. Aesthetically this leads to a very clean desktop environment but productively it does nothing to speed up my work flow and it's my desk top and panel if I want to populate them with launch icons the system should allow this.

However Mint have provided a solution in the form of the MATE desk top environment which is a fork of Gnome 2.6. If you log out of Gnome 3 you can choose to use the MATE option before logging in again. Booting into MATE and your back in the world of Gnome 2.6.x as you know and love it. 'Warning' the Mint developers do say this is still work in progress, MATE is not yet fully stable and not all the functionality is working yet, but if this comes off then there is a solution for those of us who are happy with the Gnome 2.6 interface without having to jump ship to one of the other desck top solutions, such as XFCE or LXDE.

As for Mint 12 generally, desk top environment apart, this seems like another solid release, with all the usual tweaks having been made to Ubuntu 11.10 to make it a very friendly Distribution for those new to Linux. All the codecs needed for music and video playback including Flash and propriety DVD playback are included so if you just want to brows the internet, do social media and play your music and videos this is the Linux distribution for you.

If your a more experienced Linux user and have a more demanding work flow then you may find that Gnome 3 is not your preferred choice and until MATE is more stable you may want to stick with Mint 11 or try another Debian based distribution that better meets your needs.

For the time being I'm sticking with Mint 11 Gnome edition, as there is nothing dramatic in the new release that I need to upgrade for and I'll wait and see how the development of MATE progresses in the coming months. 

Acer AspireOne RAM upgrade

This morning My friend Les from our local LUG gave me a 1Gig stick of Laptop DDR2 Ram so that I could upgrade my Acer AspireOne Netbook PC. This is one of the early Netbook models and comes with 512Ram on the mother board and an expansion slot to add a further 1Gig Ram. It also has an 8Gig SSD drive and usual 1.6Gig Atom CPU.

The main issue is that you have to almost disassemble the PC to get to the expansion slot as it is situated on the underside of the motherboard, I have done this in the past and added a 256mb ram module as that was all I had at the time but this upgrade would give the maximum potential to the Netbook. You can see how to dismantle the PC at:     

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtURqz4GSSM&feature=related

Well all went well and I installed the new memory and resembled the PC and It seemed to be working well, Boot time has reduced by about 40% and it is now far more responsive. However when I got home the PC would not connect to my home WiFi and after fiddling with the WiFi switch for a while I realised I had probably forgotten to reconnect the areal to the WiFi card. So after a further strip down to inspect this and find this was the case I reconnected the areal and all now works fine.

The moral here is if you do pull things apart make sure that you reconnect all the working bits as you are putting it all back together again.

On a more general note, it would have been better if the PC had been designed with a little more thought to allow access to the memory slot from the bottom of the PC case. I love the Acer and It has done me good service in the 2 and a half years I have owned it, but you should not have to pull a Netbook apart just to upgrade the memory. To give them credit I think Acer recognised this and later models are far simpler to upgrade.

While I'm here I recently put Lubuntu 11.10 onto the Acer. I can report that If you are not a fan of Ubuntu 11.10 with the Unity interface and need an OS that will run smoothly on lower spec hardware then Lubuntu seems to be a good choice. I've had it installed on the Acer for nearly a month now and I'm quite impressed. I have installed all the extras needed to get all the multi media working and it now does everything I need of a portable PC. With the extended battery I'm now getting a reported 9 hours battery life, a good hour more than with other Linux distro's.

To give me the office software I need I've added Impress from the Libre office suit, but stuck with Abiword and Gnumeric for word documents and spreadsheets as these require less resources.     

Linux Mint 12

Just a quick post to say I have just downloaded the release candidate for Linux Mint 12 and I am in the process of installing it in Virtual Box to give it a test drive before deciding if I will upgrade my current system when it goes to distribution release. I currently run Linux Mint 11 on my main working PC and find it quite a stable release. On first look I'm not sure I like the desktop layout. One of the reasons I like mint is the single task bar (panel) at the bottom of the desktop and the Mint menu layout. With the move to Gnome 3.2 if you want a more traditional Mint look and feel you need to log off the session and in the log on screen click on the cog on the right of the user log in panel and choose the option 'MATE' then re log on. You will now be presented with a desktop that is more akin to the current Mint 11 layout although the menu is more akin to the old traditional Gnome menu and not the current menu as in Mint 11 which I love.

On first look apart from the locked panels at the top and bottom of the desktop and the lack of the Mint 11 menu, the installed software is much the same as the current stable Mint 11. You get all the video and audio codecs installed out of the box and with the addition of Ubuntu restricted extras you will have MS fonts installed and other less 'Free' applications that Ubuntu does not include as part of the underlying operating system, this is clearly Ubuntu 11.10 under the hood but with Gnome 3.2 and without the Unity interface favoured by Canonical in their Gnome release.   

I'll post more after I have had more time to explore the differences and made a hardware install on one of my test PC's

Blackpool Linux Use Group

This morning was spent at the regular meeting of my LUG here in Blackpool.

http://blackpoollug.blogspot.com/

It was quite a constructive meeting, my friend, fellow member and fellow 'Flying Handbag' podcaster, (http://danlynch.org/blog/2011/10/handbag/) Les Pounder, helped me set up a couple of things on My Acer Aspire One Net book, which is currently running Lubuntu 11.10, and running it very well. We configured my Dropbox account as I had not yet done this since installing Lubuntu a week or so ago. We also downloaded and installed Skype and I set myself up with an account.

Mike another member and our host (We meet in the premises he runs a PC Recycling business, and Blackpool computer Club from),

http://www.blackpoolcomputerclub.co.uk/

helped me set up an Adsense account. This enables you to use web sites that you own, to show adverts and potentially generate an income from people who visit your site and then click on the adverts. Given that I have only started to Blog in the last 2 weeks, I'm not expecting to become a millionaire overnight, but the thought of a little extra cash is always appealing.

I always come away from the meetings having learnt at least one thing during the morning, and it is always good to be able to have a chat to other like minded folk without being thought of as a geek. The main thing is we learn from each other and if one of us has a particular computer or Linux (or in some cases another commonly used OS) related issue that they cannot solve, there is a good chance someone at the meeting can help out. We also share resources, lending each other books and magazines. As a LUG we are also members of the O'Reilly Books, 'User Group Programme', so we get discounts on purchases and review copies of books that we can use within the LUG.  

So when I'm not working or we're not taking the LUG on the road to an Open Source event somewhere in the Northwest and beyond, on a Saturday morning I'm generally to be found supping coffee and generally geeking at Blackpool LUG.