The Linux Experiment

Here’s another fun little tidbit – today I tried to use OpenOffice.org Writer seriously for the first time, and realized rather quickly that I was running version 2.1 of same. For those who don’t already know, OpenOffice.org was close on unusable prior to version 3.x. While it has since matured into a very capable suite of programs, the first few versions were just awful. In particular, I couldn’t get the formatting correct on a numbered list with bullet-ted sub-points.

A quick apt-get -t lenny-backports install openoffice.org did the trick, and removed my system-wide dictionary as a bonus. Now both Icedove (Thunderbird) and Pidgin claim that everything that I type is spelled incorrectly. A quick check with Synaptic confirmed that the aspell package had mysteriously disappeared from my system; when I tried to mark it for re-installation, Synaptic refused, claiming that it aspell depended on a package called dictionaries-common, which wasn’t going to be installed for some unspecified reason. Christ.

Figuring that it was a version issue (since the only thing that has changed on my system is my version of OpenOffice.org), I tried apt-get -t lenny-backports install aspell. It worked, and also warned me that my OpenOffice.org upgrade had left about 25 packages lying about that ought to be removed:

bluez-gnome, libmtp7, python-notify, obex-data-server, libgda3-common, python-gnome2-extras, evolution-exchange, rhythmbox, system-config-printer,
libgpod3, gnome-themes-extras, bluez-utils, python-eggtrayicon, openoffice.org-style-andromeda, libxalan2-java, python-4suite-xml, libgda3-3,
transmission-common, libgdl-1-0, libxalan2-java-gcj, serpentine, transmission-gtk, libgdl-1-common, gnome-vfs-obexftp

The strange thing is that some of those packages look like they might be required by software other than OpenOffice.org. You know, like Evolution, or maybe Transmission? What the hell is going on here? I’m upgrading to the Testing repositories as soon as I get the chance. Hopefully that will solve some of my old-ass-software issues.

It has been almost half a month since the experiment has begun and I think everyone is just getting to the point where they can begin to be truly productive on their systems. As such I just wanted to share my current software setup, as is, and the replacements I am using for the proprietary software packages that I  would have otherwise normally used under a Window’s environment.

Operating System

As you may have already known, I have chosen Fedora 11 as my distribution for this experiment. While it was quite a rocky start, Fedora is proving to be a competent operating system and should fit my needs for the duration of the experiment.

Office & Word Processing

Fedora ships with OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 as its office suite. I have used OpenOffice.org in the past and have found it to be a adequate alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite if not without it’s own faults. Perhaps it is just my familiarity with Microsoft’s Office suite but I find OpenOffice.org to have many odd quirks. For example its ability to open but not save to Office Open XML (*.docx, *.pptx, *.xlsx, etc.) is rather frustrating. I think for the most part I am going to be using OpenOffice.org’s preferred format, the OpenDocument Format, but I have read numerous issues with this format as well. I guess time will tell if this is a good choice or not.

Moving forward I think I am going to be looking at alternatives to OpenOffice.org, such as AbiWord or KOffice, just to see if those work better for me.

E-mail Client

As on Windows I am using Thunderbird to manage my e-mail. What’s kind of weird is I can only seem to install the Thunderbird 3 beta version from my repositories. Again you can find my contact information on my page here.

Browser

This one was a really a easy choice for me. I have been using Firefox on Windows for a long time. Fedora allows me to run the most recent version which is 3.5.3 as of this writing. My browsing experience has not changed whatsoever from how it was on Windows.

Instant Messaging

On Windows I had been mostly using Windows Live Messenger. Now that I am on Linux I have tried various IM clients including aMSN, Kopete and Pidgin. Of the bunch I think Kopete has a lot of potential but I am sticking with Pidgin. It just seems to do everything and do it mostly right.

Music/Media Management

As an alternative for iTunes I gave Rhythmbox a go and was very impressed. Next I tried Songbird and while there isn’t much difference between the two players, I like the feel of Songbird better. For videos I am still trying to decide whether I prefer VLC or MPlayer. Like Rhythmbox and Songbird there really isn’t much difference between VLC and MPlayer.

Image Manipulation

I have never been a big Photoshop person so my needs in this category were pretty easy to meet. That being said I have settled on using both the GIMP and KolourPaint to fill in any gaps.

Development

In the past I have been primarily a Windows developer using tools such as Visual Studio to get my jobs done. I would be very interested in seeing how Mono development works on Linux but in the meantime I will be using Eclipse’s Java and C/C++ tools as my primary Linux development platform.

Torrents

Because there is no µTorrent support for Linux, except under Wine, I have decided to use the native client KTorrent for all of my torrenting needs! I find it to be very similar to what I’m used to on Windows so again this is a easy solution for me.

That’s It For Now

I’ll let you know if I find any better alternatives moving forward.