Successful Endeavor

As previously posted, I have upgraded my main PC (geekbox) from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.4 and have been very pleased with the results. As with any OS, there are issues but 9.4, aka "Jaunty Jackalope" is a bug step in the right direction.

In the past, a few things have kept me tied to a Windows box (sites that require Internet Explorer, transferring files to/from my GPS unit, installing programs on my Palm PDA, and my personal finance program, AceMoney) but I still managed to do 95% of my personal computing on my Linux box. With the latest upgrade, I am happy to say that I now am able to do all those things via Linux, with the exception of using Internet Explorer. While I know I could install IE4Linux via WINE, it seems so...sacreligious to install IE on a Linus box. Maybe someday I will do that but for the time being, I am going to say no to installing it.

The other day I was able to successfully transfer 350 waypoints to my Garmin GPSMAP 60 Cx via GPSBabel, use CMConvert to convert the waypoints to a Palm pdb file, and use GPilot to install the pdb file on my Palm Centro. I may have been able to use GPSBabel to make the conversion but since I was more familiar with CMConvert, I just used that.

I also am now able to run AceMoney in WINE without any errors. By default it would run but not sort the entries but after using a Microsoft library (instead of an open source one) it worked just fine. Of course I still had to configure the WINE settings for that particular app but it was not too hard.

Video has been hit or miss in the past but now that I have install VLC, I can watch any video in my collection (mov, avi, mpg, wmv, mp4, rm, flv, and dvd). I have even grown fond of Rhythmbox (along with Last.fm gives me a rather large library of music to list to).

Scanning (with my cheap Mustek 1200 UB scanner) was a nightmare with Windows but is a breeze with Linux. My webcam (an old Logitech) has started giving me issues but I am sure that is easy enough to fix.

Yep, this upgrade has allowed me to use my Linux box for more and more daily items. Even the eye candy works with my Nvidia 5600 video card.