Going Ubuntu, continued

I’m still in research mode, mainly because the Ubuntu install CD is at work and its too damn hot to go in, and I’m too lazy to download and burn another. I don’t deserve to be called a geek, I guess.

Anyway, last post I said there didn’t seem to be a good web page on migration from Windows, but … duh! … I found a beauty on the Ubuntu help site:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwitchingToUbuntu/FromWindows

which answered most questions and is very encouraging. Strangely, Google didn’t turn this up with a reasonable query (what’s up with that?) — found it via a forum post on scanner support, through following a convoluted path of links.

Incidentally, my HP Scanjet 3500c scanner should work OK, maybe, probably. Some conflicting info between the above mentioned page and the SANE list of supported scanners, which says support is “good”. (SANE seems to be a replacement for TWAIN, which suits me.)

“More news as it comes to hand.”

Blogged with Flock

Going Ubuntu

I have an IBM T42 laptop from work which is running Win2000. Well, I’m sick of that: performance is bad and getting worse. The last straw is the recent deployment of MacAfee anti-virus software, which is server based and seems to scan my disk ALL THE TIME. Sometimes, everything grinds to a halt for no discernable reason. An outlook drives me nuts with its slowness. I’m dreading the time next year when our central IT people deploy Vista. More bloatware! So I figure, either I upgrade the 512MB T42 to something more powerful, or I put Linux onto it. I recently gave Ubuntu desktop a whirl on an old desktop box, and it looks OK. And the install is impressively simple. (Ditto for the server version, which I’ve installed on two old boxes.)

I’ve been doing some research into migration from Windows. Surprisingly, I haven’t found a nice web page of encouragement there (although I’m sure there must be one somewhere!)

Office is a no-brainer — I can run Open Office instead. (Hopefully it has improved from the early Sun version I tried a few years back!) I use Paint Shop Pro for image processing — looks like I can use GIMP on Linux. I use Picasa too — a lot — and it pains me somewhat that Picasa isn’t available for Linux (shame on Google!) although I may be able to run it with something called WINE.

My email is on Outlook, which I thought might be a problem with migrating my email archive, but it turns out Thunderbird does a brilliant job of converting Outlook’s proprietary mailbox files into standard (readable) files. So I’ve already migrated to Thunderbird on Windows. It’s like a breath of fresh air!

There are a few other things I may miss. I sync my phone with Windows, and Nokia doesn’t have a Linux platform. But, truth to tell, I can live without that. Probably go to an iPhone next year anyway.

So I’m ready to take the plunge, as soon as I finish cleaning up files and make a backup. Mainly I’m hesitating now because I’m worried about wireless connectivity and USB support for my camera and scanner. From my reading, there doesn’t seem to be an issue with these things.

We’ll see.

Blogged with Flock

Paperless

Being the last working day of the year yesterday, I decided to purge my filing cabinet — I have a four-drawer in my office. Two hours later, I had not only purged it, I had emptied it! Lots of invoices and such dating back to 1995, and all old, went in the recycle bin. Lots of glossy brochures for now-dated equipment went in the regular bin. Untold and embarrassing amounts of prints from the web — pdfs or web pages — yep, into the recycle bin. Out of four drawers, I found just three documents that needed to be “kept” — these I scanned and then recycled. Everything else was either redundant, copies of someone else’s docs, or available online.

So I am now running a completely (almost) paperless office!

Next year, I vow that i will remain “paperless”, to the extent the rest of the world allows.

No more printing and filing things available on the web — these will be bookmarked on del.iciio.us if necessary.

Anything sent to me that needs preserving will be scanned and filed on disk. Anything else will be read (maybe) and recycled.

Anything emailed to me will be read on the laptop.

NO MORE PAPER! Woo!

Blogged with Flock

Journals Store project

Hard at work, originally uploaded by Spotrick.

It was a busy week last week — lots happening, what with xmas events and so on. Among other things, our Library started a project shifting bound volumes of journals to our store — those which are also available on line. (We purchased Elsevier back-sets through Science Direct.)

So our team (mostly from Lending Services) has been hard at work removing volumes from the shelves, processing them (changing their location in the Catalogue and labeling them), and crating them up for sending to the store.

In four and a half days, they’ve shifted over 7,000 volumes, which is pretty good going. (On the other hand, that represents only 0.35% of our collection!)

I’ve been trying to capture all this on “film”, but have not yet found the definitive image. I’ll try again next week.

360 Search — it’s not bad!

Just back from a demo of “360 Search”, a Federated Search product from Serials Solutions. Now while I have previously said that Federated Search is a load of dingos kidneys, and will never work, I have to say I was quite impressed with this offering. It still suffers from the same problem that all FS products share, namely the dependence on external providers’ response times affecting the local response. But the demo searched over 20 databases simultaneously and brought back a consolidated 450+ result set in around 60 seconds, so that’s not bad performance, considering.

One very nice feature here is the inclusion of results clustering (using software from Vivisimo), which is great, and makes narrowing of the result set easy.

We were looking at it for a very specific and narrow purpose, but … despite my previous experience and subsequent loathing of FS … I think this is good enough to put in front of students.

Time will tell.

Blogged with Flock