igal — nice tool for generating html image slide shows

After a wasted hour trying to make sense of Gimp — I just wanted to generate thumbnails from images — I eventually stumbled over a simple Linux command line tool called igal. Not only does this generate the thumbnails, it also resizes the originals to a manageable size, and generates the HTML pages to display the images as a slideshow. Neat.

This is why I love Linux. Think of a tool you need, and someone has probably created it.

Going Ubuntu — success!

Success on all fronts! Woo!

First, I have Wireless working. To be honest, it seems to have fixed itself. I simply used the Network Manager icon thingy to configure wireless and it worked. Probably, my previous attempt was hampered by an excess of knowledge — playing around with ifconfig/iwconfig was maybe a bad idea.

Second, I have Synaptic fixed — following a hint in a forum post which suggested adding the IP of the distro site (au.archive.ubuntu.com) as a proxy server in settings. Slightly bizarre, but … worked!

Once I had that fixed, I could then use the Add/Remove tool to install Thunderbird, which then gave me back my email (and sanity).

As far as I care right now, that’s it. I have everything I need for a functioning system.

Oh, and I also played with F-Spot photo manager, which seems to work well, including an uploader to Flickr, so I really do have everything now.

(Except Flock, which I miss slightly,, but … hey, at least its not Windoze!)

Going Ubuntu — in trouble again

Well, it has been a torrid few days. First, my “other” laptop died with the “Regency Wallpaper screen of death” (followed by a complete refusal to turn on). So this put a slight crimp in my plans. I didn’t really want to wipe my only existing laptop by installing Ubuntu without knowing it would work / I had other means of contacting the world. A friend loaned us a very old but functioning Toshiba, so …

… I did it. I installed Ubuntu. Now I’m in all sorts of strife! Obviously I have a working install (although it took a day to get the networking sorted, and I still don’t have wireless working). Firefox is working well and I can access the world.

But various things don’t work:

• Synaptic / apt-get don’t work. This is a major bummer, since there are many things I want to install, and the bugger won’t connect to sources or update. Forums don’t help here, since the only threads I found just peter out without resolution. If I can’t get this solved, then I guess I’ll have to give up.
• Evolution doesn’t work. OK, it opens, but it won’t connect to my mail server. (Yes, I have checked all the settings, multiple times.)
• Can’t install Thunderbird. See Synaptic above, but even downloading from Mozilla and installing manually doesn’t help, since TB requires libstdc++.so.5 and Ubuntu/Gutsy has libstdc++.so.6
• So I have no email access except through webmail. (Ugh!)
• Wireless doesn’t work. Configures, but doesn’t work. Help suggests I need to make a Kernel change to disable apci, but doesn’t say how. “Boot the kernel with the pci=noacpi option.” WTF? I haven’t had time to research this.

So right now I’m a little overwhelmed with problems!

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.”

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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.

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