Since the last post, I’ve been gradually switching to Ubuntu. Most of the time has been spent trying to figure out alternatives, hacks and secret hallways into the depths of Google. It sure is conforting to see the beast Ubuntu is becoming and watch as (most of the times) all my doubts are vanished and I learn a new trick. I’ve had the chance to speak to a few switchers as well, some of them people who actually aren’t into technology as much as I do, and see that they’re actually liking the change. Converted. Free (at least while the hype lasts) from Microsoft. Into something new and good.
What have I been up to?

There were a few additional steps I needed to take to achieve full control of the beast. Here are a few, for my personal reference or for the search engine monsters to dive into.

Mozilla Firefox configuration, preferences and extensions were seamlessly migrated from the Windows partition. Mozilla Thunderbird configuration had the same fate, but I backed up all my email to the Gmail account using GML and started dumping messages from scratch. I had to reinstall enigmail and give it a kick in the balls, but it looks alright now. I’m eager to try freenigma (a Firefox plugin which uses GnuPG to encrypt/decrypt/sign webmail messages) as soon as I sort another bunch of things out, but it looks promising.

Automatix does a great job installing and configuring a bunch of “uneasy” applications in a almost painless way (but also risky and undocumented). I also found EasyUbuntu to be a great alternative (with a GUI and uninstall features) to achieve this as well.

Gaim 2.0.0 beta 3 is up and running (courtesy of Automatix) and it suits all my instant messaging needs (there’s pretty good information at the Google Talk support side on how to use Gaim to… uhm.. Google Talk). The only thing left to sort out is the otr plugin. I’ll have to look into a compatible encryption library who plays well with 2.0.0 beta 3.

The WiFi configuration war had its final breath shortly after I first wrote about it. I was installing a great News/RSS reader called liferea and spotted an article on gnomefiles about a piece of software called WiFi Radar. It enables you to scan for available networks and create profiles for your preferred networks. At boot time, running WiFi Radar will automatically scan for an available preferred network and connect to it. Spiff warned me about this later. Wait a minute. I swear I had heard him switching to Mac OS X.

Cisco Systems VPN Client: Download it from Cisco’s website (requires registration) and use this procedure vaguely as a guide to compile and install it (there’s a source code patch and detailed information i’d like to redo a couple of times just to understand what’s really happening - it looks like it still compiles if you forget the patch and patches may fail if the kernel headers are different from the expected - I’m using 2.6.15-26-386). Certificate and connection files were copied from the Windows counterpart. It still needs a couple of fixes. Working on it…

Provided Rhythmbox wasn’t able to connect to local network mt-daapd servers (or iTunes), altough it issued some daap related messages if launched with debug flags. I even tried a newer release from Rhythmbox, but it refused to cooperate. It turns out it happened because there was no mDNS client available on the system. It was just a matter of installing the avahi-utils package. As simple as that.

Getting stuff in and out of the Garmin GPS was also really easy. I had used gpsbabel before to convert file formats (there’s also an web-service offering this) but I never thought it played so well with the USB port. Really, the hardest part about this is knowing the device the GPS is bound to when connected to an USB port (just take a closer look at /var/log/messages - I wonder if there is any applet providing this). Then it’s just gpsbabel -i geo -f geocaching.loc -o garmin -F /dev/ttyUSB3 - Hey, a GUI wouldn’t hurt, guys. Seriously.

And then at a given point, Firefox was unable to output any sound from YouTube videos. The solution was a click away and spotted here: installing the alsa-oss package and making sure /etc/firefox/firefoxrc had “FIREFOX_DSP=aoss” instead of the default value. Neat.

CPU frequency scaling had, by default, its behaviour locked to automatic choosing of CPU frequency. All regarding setting unnecessary superuser powers to yet another application. Quoting: “And why should a normal user be able to change the CPU speed in the first place? The automatic CPU speed works well enough for the majority of users, and control freaks can always use sudo to manually set the speed, or deliberately shoot themselves in the foot by making the binary suid root”. And that’s the trick. Issue a sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets and answer “Yes” to the question regarding setting the suid of the cpufreq-selector executable. Now, when I left click the CPU Frequency Monitor Applet, I’m able to choose the behaviour (powersave, max. performance, etc) and/or the processor speed. Yay.

Working on: OziExplorer under Wine. And then some minor applications I used to use (and then some I don’t depend on but would be cool to keep at hand). Wine to the rescue.
Annoyances? Yep. Some. gDesklets refuses to work with transparency/translucency/whatever. root-tail output doesn’t even dare to show up. Probably something regarding Xorg configuration, I bet.