Small breakthrough tonight.

A couple of days ago, I had a family member drop his notebook PC at my place. It needed a quick runover, and some things updated, it was a "Scompaq" Armada M700, running XP. It's not one of those machines you'd expect to run XP smoothly, so I convinced him that they needed Ubuntu to run programs faster and more efficient. He said "OK, let's have a go at it. The only thing I really need, is a browser which runs flash,acrobat,mpg's, and the lot... And it should run wireless too"
alright..Challenge taken...Problem solved!
I ran down the local "PC pusher" and bought a cheap wireless pc-card "Zyxel G-162". First I tried it without installing any ndiswrapper and windoze drivers, but I used all night yesterday without success. Then I decided to try what they describe in the ndiswrapper howto and installed the windoze driver that came with the card. SUCCESS!! It connected right away, using 128Bit WEP encryption and all, Leds flashing, and 100% signal strength(yes I'm standing right next to the access point).

Now I'll grab a copy of automatix, the automatic installer for most multimedia programs, codecs and plugins for firefox.

Album shaper, it's worldclass!

I'm short for words! I've found a "hidden" treasure, sort of... The album shaper software I mentioned in the previous post, does absolutely all the things you'd want from such a program. Here's a short list :
1. Organize you photos, in neat collections
2. Enhance your photos, color/contrast enhancement + red eye + remove grain
3. Manipulate, add filters like sepia, emboss, painting and black&white conversion
4. Crop, a few preset and a custom is available, Postcard is the one I wished for ;).
5. Create an album, to upload as is to a webhotel (templates included).
6. Export the manipulated images to a directory for printing.

I must say, this is one of my top priority picks for all future installations.

Finding "hidden" treasures.

I know I've been promoting F-spot, as THE photo organizing program for Linux. But that was because I didn't know better, or maybe because some other fool promoted this as being "THE THING".
Anyway, as the curious human being I am, I had to take a look at packages.ubuntu.com to check out, what some of the members at Ubuntu forums where talking about.
Looking in the x11 section I stumbled upon 'albumshaper', Photo album creator and photo manipulator. <- I need to check this out when I get home. It looks really cool, you have the posibility to do a lot more actions with your pictures. I hope crop format 10x15cm is supported....
What else is hidden in these package sections? I can't wait till I get the time to crawl it!

to Switch or not to Switch.

It's been a couple of days now. I've run into a problem I must resolve, before transforming my "machine park" into Linux's, and remove XP out of my sight, forever I hope. Ain't that a dream? Well, the nagging problem just put a stop on that dream.
I've been struggling with Firefox and the Java runtime plugin! I've had both the version 1.4 and the 1.5 Sun jre installed, and made the so called 'symbolic link' to both from the firefox/plugins folder, to be exact "/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins/".
But they both had a very bad habit of yelling :

Netscape security model is no longer supported.

Please migrate to the Java 2 security model instead.

and refused to work with my banking applet.
Later I tried installing a Blackdown jre from the Ubuntu repositories, and letting this version tell firefox where to look for the plugin, no luck either, this time it just stalls when starting the applet.
I've posted my first question at the Ubuntu forums, so if anyone, with an answer, happens to stop by, please leave a note.

Thanx anyway. I'll report back with the solution, if I find any :)

Report back: look at another post, where I tell you all about the solution.

Committing to the LinuxWorld.

I've registered as a Linux user at The Linux Counter.
It's like being part of something bigger... At the time of writing the number of users registered is 142809, and the people behind The Linux Counter estimates that there's

twenty-nine million linux users

around the world, which is far from the number I got, when registering. But they try to explain why the number is so far from each other here.

My Ubuntu Linux - must have - list.

List of Software that I have installed on top of the standard Desktop Ubuntu installation :

1. Kino, video editing.
2. ffMpeg, to encode your home video.
3. MJpeg, to encode aswell.
   
4. F-Spot, get your pictures sorted, and edit.
5. InitNG, New Generation bootup for Linux.
6. Nvidia GLX legacy drivers.
7. Java sdk1.4.2, for developers. Needed with your Firefox aswell.
   
8. Screem, HTML, PHP and other - editor.
   
9. Samba, share your linux files via network. (only if you use Win32 also)
   
10. Xmms, listen to Mp3, Ogg, aso.
11. Xine, watch video whatever, and hear the sound.
12. AcidRip, to make that DVD copy, for your kids to handle.
    
13. css2, for playing DVD's.
14. Gnomebaker, burn CD's & DVD's.
15. Pan, Newsreader.
16. Alien, convert .rpm packages to .deb
17. MPlayer W32 codecs, to have xine play streaming videos from the net.
    

Back in the 'game', full throttle!

I'm back! What an old expression. But really, that's how I feel it when I reinstall. I've allways tried not to do that too often, with Windoze, because it takes hours, and it's a pain.. with Ubuntu it feels different. It does take hours, but you don't need to be there all the time.
- Make you choices and leave the installation for a while, come back, pickup the ejected CD and reboot.
- Install the free software that you want, with the help from Synaptic, and never reboot again, unless you install new generation init 'initNG' hi hi... and you're ready to personalize you're Gnome desktop.
For personalization, take a look at this art site for Gnome or Gnome-look.
If you're using Kubuntu, take a look at this site kde-look.

It might give you a thrill installing gDesklets those cool looking little apps that run on you desktop...

I'm going to post a Screen-shot later ...

Rage is what comes next.

I had a 'font' problem. Some default system font had been overwritten at some stage. I'm not sure how and when, it might have been some program I installed, or some update that went wrong. I'm kind'a leaning towards the 'update' thingy.
But as this font-problem had no plausible cause, I was left quite alone with it. No answers in the forums, no correct Google answers... At the same time I had problems with my HDD, bad blocks was showing up... Could this be the cause? I'm not sure.. I've had problems with this drive before.
That, and the fact that the drive is only 10GB, convinced me that I had to reinstall on another partition.
It's not easy trying to do this manually, not when you are, still is, a noob. But I muddled along and had the system up'n'runnin.
But HELL! The 'general system font' still had a problem... Was this the ubuntu archive at : dk. Something I can't remember? Or might it be that I have a preview Breezy... I tried to find the mirror at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Archive but it's now gone... hmm! smells like...
I'll download a new distribution CD, and try it again..
What a pitty, I was really happy with the configuration, and just starting to get some work done, but now it's probably all 'down the drain'.

- Wrapup. I've installed Ubuntu on another drive, and with a new Breezy CD. It has no errors, and it took me as little as 2 hours to do the job. And that's including all previously installed software as well.