With all due respect, I don’t really like Amarok or Rhythmbox. Lots of people do. It’s a personal thing. I settled on Banshee for a while and that is indeed a fine player, doing almost everything I wanted. But I’m a visual person and I like to change how a program looks and I couldn’t see any way of doing that. So I looked a bit closer at the Ubuntu Software Center and after several tries, found what is probably my ideal player, Jajuk.

As the website says, the software is designed to be intuitive and provide different visions of your collection. It also has skins.

It’s really easy to make a grey geek happy. Really.

After four months on Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) I surprised myself the other
day by realising how few programs I’ve actually changed from Windows Xp.
Of course I used a lot of open source on windows anyway, and there
have been a few programs I haven’t been able to replace on a practical level.

So here’s a list (everybody’s making them, so why not me).

What seems second nature now seemed pretty complicated then, so I thought I’d reproduce the list with a March 2009 update. NB Many can be simply installed through Add/Remove, or come as standard, but I give the link to the website anyway.

PDF viewer:
Xp: Adobe
Ubuntu: Adobe
update March 09: evince Document Viewer

Browser:
Xp: Firefox
Ubuntu: Firefox

Mail:
Xp:Thunderbird
Ubuntu: Thunderbird

html editor:
Xp: 1st Page 2000
Ubuntu: Bluefish

Simple Graphics:
Xp:Irfan View
Ubuntu: Irfan View (via WINE)
update March 09: I now use Gimp almost exclusively, with occasional use of the tools in Digikam.

Complex Graphics:
Xp: Photofiltre:
Ubuntu: Gimp (still too complicated for me but see Gimp Quickies).
update March 09: Much more familiar with Gimp – for what I need to do.

Photo organizer:
Xp:Picassa
(K)Ubuntu: Digikam

Music Organizer:
Xp:Songbird
Ubuntu:Songbird

FTP
Xp: Filezilla 2.5
Ubuntu: Filezilla 3 beta
update March 09: Filezilla

Word Processing:
Xp: Open Office
Ubuntu :Open Office

Genealogy:
Xp: Personal Ancestral File, GenealogyJ
Ubuntu: Gramps (haven’t downloaded crossplatform GenealogyJ yet)
update March 09: Now exclusively use PHPGedview

Anti-virus:
Xp: AVG
Ubuntu: AVG for Linux (they say you don’t need it but…)
update March 09: Ubuntu security.

Firewall:
Xp: Agnitum Fireall
Ubuntu: Firestarter
update March 09: Ubuntu security.

Dictionary/Thesaurus:
Xp: Wordweb
Ubuntu: Wordweb (via WINE)
update March 09: Open Dictionary and Open Dict.

Colour Picker:
Xp: Color Cop
Ubuntu: Color Cop (via WINE)
update March 09: Agave (click on a color/colour button beside the drop-down menu and up pops an excellent colour/color picker, complete with eyedropper that you can drag anywhere onto your screen to select that color/colour.)

Mind Mapping:
Xp: Freemind
Ubuntu: None (haven’t downloaded Freemind yet and apparently it’s tricky to install on Ubuntu)
update March 09: Xmind (though I haven’t used it much. I believe Freemind is easier to install now.

Media Pre-Production:
Xp: Celtx
Ubuntu: None.(haven’t downloaded Celtx yet. No script to write at present ;>)
update March 09: Celtx

Astronomy:
Xp: Stellarium
Ubuntu: None (haven’t downloaded Stellarium yet).
update March 09: ie I haven’t installed it yet. It’s in Add/Remove.

Sound Editor:
Xp: Audacity
Ubuntu: Audacity (except it isn’t working in Ubuntu – due to clashing sound codecs?)
update March 09: Still have the sound problem.

Collection Manager:
Xp: MediaMan
Ubuntu: Tellico

File Extractor:
Xp: Zipgenius
Ubuntu: Nautilus Extract Here (on the right-click menu)

OCR:
Xp: Omnipage SE
Ubuntu: hopefully the software on the 3-in-1 scanner when/if I get it working.
update March 09: Nope, no ocr in the software. Scans okay, but no OCR. Hoping that ocropus will do the job.

Unit converter
Xp: Numerical Chameleon
Ubuntu: None (Haven’t downloaded crossplatform Numerical Chameleon yet)
update March 09: ConvertAll

Tellico is for KDE, not Gnome, which I use, but works delightfully. Likewise DigiKam (I’d probably look at more in KDE, if every program didn’t have a K in it! The other new programs I’m very happy with are Bluefish Editor, Gramps Genealogy Project, and Geany Text Editor.

I’d prefer to make a clean sweep and not use WINE, but GIMP is too complicated at the moment (just takes time, I suppose), and I couldn’t get a powerful enough dictionary that I could install. Bluefish doesn’t have everything I want, but I can work around that very well. I tried to use Aptana, but it was too much for what I needed at present.
Zim Desktop Wiki is another new program which has proved useful (get it in Applications/Add Remove)

That’s it, I think. Comments welcome, as usual.

In my own case I hesitated before I blitzed Windows because of the dozen or so websites I look after both for myself and my friends. How would I check how the site looked in IE? Of course there’s always Wine, an excellent project, and I tried that for a while, but didn’t bother to install it when I upgraded to Intrepid Ibex.

Then, how to check broken links If you have a site with over a thousand links, as I have in Irish Culture Guide, for example. With Windows I used the excellent Xenu’s Link Sleuth (TM).

Naturally I checked its website to see if it had a Linux equivalent

No, I won’t make a Java, MacOS, Linux, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Beos, Palm, C64 or SAP version. Don’t even ask! (However I have been told that it will run faultlessly under Red Hat 8 and Ubuntu via wine, and under Crossover on a Mac )

The poor developer (Tilman Hausherr) must be swamped with requests.

The thing is, of course, that more and more software is web-based. And I’ve found two that are a godsend for anyone who does a lot of work with websites. Some professionals may turn up their nose, though I can’t think of a reason why they should.

IE Net Renderer

Dead Links

Their names say it all, I think. Dead Links warns that it will tag a link as dead if it takes too long to load, and a rule of thumb is that if it is the domain name, eg http://www.domainname.com, it’s unlikely to be dead.
This is a sensible compromise between accuracy and speed.

So. two more steps along the road to freedom.

sit back and relax as Moonlight is installed.

It took half the night to install what appears to have been a couple of gig of diskspace.
Now I want to get rid of it.

Out, damned spot!

But I can’t.

All suggestions welcome.

For the record, the video was Muhammed Yunus speaking at the Microsoft Partners Conference and it was well worth the trouble. However, for those of you without Silverlight/Moonlight, check out this great Nobel Prize-winner here. There are several videos of him at this site but I recommend his talk on Social Business to the Commonwealth Club San Francisco, CA.

But poor old WordWeb, while it works, looks a bit lame in Ubuntu (I suppose in Gnome), a bit like Skype does, apart from the fact that it takes an age to load in Wine. So this evening I found myself annoyed, and determined to find a Linux alternative.

I spotted OpenDict in Add/Remove Applications and installed it. Anything with Open in it has got to be good, right? I was initially disappointed, despite the accompanying Irish/English, Spanish/English, and English/German dictionaries, which I was pleased to find. But I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of downloading and installing new English-English dictionaries, even if I could find them.

It was then I tried Tools/Connect to Dict Server in OpenDict. Hey presto, a great English-English dictionary, complete with etymologies, plus a Thesaurus, comprising of returns from The Collaborative International Dictionary of English, Wordnet, and Moby Thesaurus II.

What more could I ask?

OpenDict is a multiplatform dictionary, and it’s website is here

Dict.org is here

Thanks to all concerned.