Move Notes

Updated: 21 January 2008

I’m finally all moved in to my groovy free software pad, even if still unpacking boxes and with much exploring to do of the many rooms in my new ice cream castle. I’m still relying on some proprietary furnishings: drivers and encumbered media. That’s just the man trying to keep me down, man.

But for the most part, I’m here! It’s the operating system and applications that presented the biggest roadblock on my personal road to freedom. Drivers are a concern, but you can look for hardware with free drivers. Proprietary media formats can be a problem also, but for now I’m celebrating how far I’ve traveled.

This page was meant to track progress on figuring out how to do in GNU/Linux the various things I was able to do in Windows. A before and after kind of thing, and I think it served that purpose, more or less. I think now it will serve as an historical snapshot. A record of before and afters (not intended to be comprehensive) and some notes on the move. (Although maybe there’ll be an update on drivers and media formats someday…)

Some Milestones

And that is pretty much that. I’m essentially done with Microsoft Windows and most proprietary applications for home use. Woo hoo!

You can take a look at the moving and move notes categories for more in this vein. My categorization process changes and is inconsistent at best, but those two categories seem to be associated with many specific posts about the journey.

Please feel free to comment on this page in the related blog posting.

Before and After

More notes on this table below.*

What Windows GNU/Linux Notes
Text Editor

I’ve used vi for several years for editing config files on Unix servers so am comfortable with it. I like that it’s lightweight and always available.

I was happy to discover that the built-in editor in GNOME is really nice: gedit. It has most of what I used in Crimson Editor.

2 things I’d like to have in gedit:

  • a quick way to toggle between line wrap modes (I like Crimson’s CTRL+SHIFT+W)
  • a column select mode (another Crimson feature, where you can easily toggle and select multiple lines between a range of columns, e.g., only columns 11-20)

January ‘07
Personal Finance

I initially thought I’d use GnuCash, but ended up going with KMyMoney.

January ‘08
Office / Productivity MS Office OpenOffice.org (OO.o)

OO.o Writer and Calc are acceptable alternatives to MS Word and Excel. Writer needs a few more page view options. Web view lets you expand a page to fill the working area of the application, but everything blends together in to a single page. (More or less.)

As of OO.o 2.2, I think Excel is much better, but Calc works for my purposes. I was able to figure out most of the things in OO.o Basic for which I had previously used VBA in Excel.

January ‘08
Graphics

A related post: GNU/Linux Graphics Programs in Ubuntu.

This was an easy move for me. There are a lot of great free software graphics programs.

IrfanView handled batch resizing nicely, but I’m sure there are utilities around with which I can write simple scripts to take care of this. I also liked using IrfanView to cycle through and rename files. To replace that, I wrote my own Java program: Picture Filer.

March, November ‘07
CD/DVD Burning Nero Burning Rom

See related posts:

April, July ‘07
Java IDE Eclipse

Eclipse and NetBeans are both great Java IDEs. I wrote in a related post about moving to NetBeans from Eclipse, but I think I’ll be using both depending on the project. I’ve had a chance to work more with Eclipse and have gotten over some of the things that put me off from it initially.

January, August ‘07
Graphical Diff Program WinMerge Meld

WinMerge is a great free software utility (GPL), but it’s only for Windows. (As you might guess from the “Win” prefix.) For GNOME, there is Meld, available in the Ubuntu repositories, and it looks great on first glance. I’m sure it’s free software, although the license isn’t advertised very prominently.

September ‘07
Filesystem Crypto
  • TrueCrypt
  • GPG

TrueCrypt is a nice encryption program that works well on both Windows and GNU/Linux, but I’ll more likely go with EncFS for most of my encryption needs.

Reasons include that I can run it as a regular user and it allows me to easily grow and shrink the amount of file space needed, without defining container sizes in advance. You can read more about my experiences using both in GNU/Linux: EncFS and TrueCrypt.

(Also find an interesting discussion of TrueCrypt at Bruce Schneier’s blog.)

I include GPG in the list for completeness. It’s great for many things including some local file encryption jobs, but you probably wouldn’t want to use it for encrypting file systems or groups of files that you regularly work with and want to securely and conveniently access.

February ‘07
Password Crypto Password Safe

Password Safe for Windows is a great password management program. Password Gorilla is a decent alternative for GNU/Linux that use the same file/database format. Password Safe SWT is a Java port in the works that I hope will live up to the original someday. Read more in a related post.

March ‘07
Remote Control
  • Remote Desktop
  • VNC
 VNC

Remote Desktop Connection in Windows XP is excellent. VNC was so-so for Windows. I could effectively work on Remote Desktop but could only stand VNC for quick jobs.

VNC for GNU/Linux works great. I’ve previously gotten it working on Fedora, and now have it working in Ubuntu also. (As of January 2008, the linked post is far and away the most popular page on this web site, thanks to Google searchers.)

February ‘07
WordPress Local “Dev” Instance WAMP LAMP

HOWTO: Installing and Running WordPress on Ubuntu GNU/Linux

May ‘07
FTP WS-FTP gFTP

gFTP is excellent. With bookmarks and sFTP (ssh) support, I don’t miss anything from WS-FTP.

June ‘07
Web Browser Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Firefox

Phew… tough one.
Email Mozilla Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird

Ditto.

Miscellaneous

What Windows GNU/Linux Notes
Data Backup Homebrew VB: SacBac rsync

I’m using rsync to a drive on the network, which mirrors to another drive nightly. This gives me multiple generation backups. Need to do some work to make weekly DVD backups easier.

April ‘07
Remote/Network Drives/Shares Tools –> Map Network Drive (Mount)
Samba
NFS

Related Posts: One, Two, and Three

February ‘07

* This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of replacements. There are other sites out there that provide more alternatives for more applications, such as The Linux Equivalent Project and Ubuntu Guide Wiki Alternatives.

Open Source Windows has a nice list of free applications for Windows, many (most?) of which are available for free operating systems. This is a good way to start the move while still using Windows. (I think most of these are free–as in freedom–but I haven’t checked out every application in the list. This is one of the problems with using the term “open source.” By identifying the list as “free and open-source,” I’m not sure if there are non-free apps included.)

On this page are just the apps that I use and am aware of today, and planning on investigating and using in the free world. In general I look for large, well-supported free projects for the best chance of long term availability.