The Vista fever finally breaks after applying a cool Linux compress.

As promised, this entry concerns software. Specifically, getting some of my software from Windows moved over to Linux.

First, a note on what I didn’t need to move over.

• No multiple-desktop program; that’s built in (and works a lot better than most of the ones I’ve used under Windows).
• No defragger; Linux’s ext3 drive format is self-defragging under most circumstances, the way NTFS was supposed to work.
• No software firewall; that’s already built in too.
• No virus/spyware scanner; that will probably be a good idea some day, but right now such “malware” is almost exclusively written for Windows.
• In fact, no further security software is generally needed at all, because Linux was designed from the ground up with multi-user security in mind. Even if some form of malware manages to get into it, all it can mess with is the data of the person who was logged into the system when it got in; the system’s files, and files belonging to other users, are completely safe from it.

Now on to what I did need to move. I decided to start with programs that had native Linux versions as well as Windows ones; in theory, I could just install the Linux version and copy my data over, and it would work. We’ll see how well that holds up.

Firefox is my preferred browser. I expected no difficulty in moving it over, and I didn’t have any: the program was already installed by Ubuntu’s installer, so I just copied my bookmarks.html file to the Linux machine’s profile, reinstalled my add-ons, set my home page, and I was done.

I use GnuPG to sign my e-mails, and encrypt messages with some business correspondents, and have for years. That was designed for Linux/UNIX, and was already installed by Ubuntu as well, so I only had to copy my keyring files over and it worked.

A good part of my work involves answering e-mail, so my preferred e-mail program, Thunderbird 2.0, was next on the list. I’d switched to an earlier version of it nearly a year ago, specifically to make this eventual change-over easier. Except that it wasn’t available from the package manager in Ubuntu, only the 1.5 version was, and I didn’t want to go back to that — 2.0 has some nice little improvements. After some research, I picked up a package manager called Automatix… my Linux-using friend was horrified, saying that it had a really bad reputation (which seems to be true), but it’s the only package manager that I could find with Thunderbird 2.0 in it. I’ll avoid using it for anything else, for now.

Getting my Thunderbird data moved over looked as easy as pie: just copy the files over and make a few simple changes to the “prefs.js” one (to account for the different path names), and it would be fine. I made a backup, because I’m paranoid about losing information, and gave it a try. It seemed to work… at first.

I wasn’t sure what was going on, but it didn’t take too long to figure it out. Every time Thunderbird compressed a folder, it would corrupt it. Badly. Usually only one or two messages would be left in it, and they would often contain bits and pieces of other messages that had been there previously. I was sure that someone else must have run into this problem and posted about it, but exhaustive searches of the ‘net failed to turn up any reference to it. I spent many hours, over several days, trying different things to figure out what caused it, to no avail… the mailbox files weren’t the culprits, nor were the end-of-line markers in them (those were my first guess, since that’s a known difficulty between DOS/Windows and Linux systems). It didn’t matter whether the files were on a Linux ext3 drive or a Windows FAT32 one, either. And it wasn’t a 2.0-specific bug; I tried installing the 1.5 version, using the standard package manager, and it did the exact same thing.

I did discover that the problem didn’t happen when using a profile created by the Linux machine, only when using the one that I’d created under Windows, though. So I ended up creating a new profile from scratch on the Linux system and re-entering all of my settings and filters. I was able to use my existing address books and e-mail archives unchanged; the address book files were a little tricky, but I simply had to copy the mail files over. Whew!

Next up is Skype. A quick perusal of Ubuntu’s default package manager didn’t show that one either. Automatix had it, but as I didn’t want to use that any more than I had to, I decided to look for alternatives. I found one called Easy Ubuntu. It seemed to have a good reputation, and it knew about Skype, so I gave it a whirl.

A couple clicks, and Skype was installed. I opened it up, entered my username and password, and it came up… with an empty contact list. All it said was “Ungrouped Contacts (0/0)”. I remembered hearing that the Linux version wasn’t as sophisticated as the Windows one, but was it so primitive that it couldn’t even retrieve my contact list from the server?

As it turns out, it isn’t that bad. When I exited it and started it up a second time, all my contacts appeared; apparently they were just hidden on the first run for some reason. The interface is slightly more primitive, and it doesn’t look like it supports webcams, but otherwise it seems to be fine.

So several of my main programs are safely moved over now, including the two (the web browser and the e-mail program) that are the most likely vectors for viruses and spyware. I’m feeling safer already. 🙂

Of course, that was the easy part; these programs were designed to work on both Windows and Linux. Next up: finding replacements for the ones that don’t have Linux versions.