I hope you all had a happy Christmas and New Year’s Eve and I wish you all, especially friends and family, a wonderful 2007.

To all friends and family who might have expected to hear from me over the weekend, I’ve been caught in the grip of tech-hypnosis. I’m wrecked.

Before embarking on installing Ubuntu Linux, something I’ve threatened to do for a long time, I had to back up the thousands of files on my computer. That in itself is no bad thing, and long overdue, but it took a long time, as I was backing up to cd roms. (Yes, I know, but I hate those terrabyte backup gizmos).

My main concern was my emails, addresses, and many passwords, and all the settings for same and for FileZilla, the ftp program. I look after several websites for friends as well as myself, so there was a certain responsibility to others involved.

Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) installed like a dream and I thought I was in clover. I was a little nervous about the partioning, in case it would wreck my XP, but it seems all is well and very efficient.

But then the trouble started. Despite all my reading over the last several months, the reality is that I still haven’t found a way of transferring my emails and settings – or rather I found several ways on the web, but the practicalities of implementing these methods defeated me at every turn.

Then I gave up and decided to relax and watch a dvd I had started the other night, an old favourite, La Dolce Vita..

But no.

“Totem could not play ‘dvd://media/cdrom0
No uri handler implemented for “dvd”

Oh.

What the hell does that mean? Well, I found out in Google of course. The bold Totem is missing the necessary codecs to play a dvd, even though it’s listed as a dvd player.

Another search on the Ubuntu forums produced a couple of solutions, but they all involved something called ‘sudo’
eg

sudo apt-get install vlc

But how do you ‘sudo’? I know something about how the package manager works (it’s different in the previous version of Ubuntu by the way) because there’s a rare, graphic tutorial here.

So once again I gave up. (Note to self: Not like me to give up).

I found an interesting Book Collection Manager, called Alexandria, which apparently can import from Amazon etc. So I tried that. If I entered ‘Casey’ it would happily import dozens of book details by Caseys I’ve never heard of, but if I entered ‘Philip Casey’ it crashed. Twice. I know when I’m not wanted and I had the useful excercise of deleting it, Ubuntu fashion.

In the end, I managed to import my passwords into Firefox, thanks to an excellent extension inadequately called Password Exporter, so I could access WordPress from the Linux version of Firefox.

One last thing: can anyone tell me why the menus in Linux Firefox are different to Windows Firefox? I have version 2, but the menus seem to be from version 1.xx.

Anyway, I’m off to watch La Dolce Vita on XP. It looks like Ubuntu will be
a hobby till I get the hang of it. I intend to get the hang of it, and if my peripherals all work with it I hope to eventually dump XP. I like the concept too much to abandon it, but don’t let anyone tell me Ubuntu’s for the masses.

Ubuntu