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Well today I am very pleased to announce that my previous partition strategy has resulted in one of the most pleasant experience upgrading Linux I have ever had on a Windows dual-boot box I’ve ever had. Here’s how I did it:

1. Dowload the Kubuntu CD 7.10 (Feisty Fawn Herd 4 in my case).
2. I booted to the CD and clicked icon to Install
3. Important: I chose “manual partitioning” when prompted.
4. I selected the root partition (hda2) and marked it to be re-formatted.
5. I then chose the same partition scheme that I did before:
   1. /dev/hda1 (/media/vista)
   2. /dev/hda2 (/)
   3. /dev/hda3 (swap)
   4. /dev/hda4 (/home) Note: I specifically chose NOT to format this one.
6. Then I chose the same username.
7. After everything was done I just restarted and ALL of my settings, desktop preferences, Firefox addons, files and documents, everything was just the way I left it and ready to go.
8. Time: < 20 minutes (less than half my lunch hour). ;-)

I’m very happy now to be looking and kicking the tires of what’s coming in the next release of Kubuntu.

Hi everyone: I just came across the following paragraph in a review of word processors I felt was pretty compelling:

• “Let us be clear: the choice is not between being able to interoperate with Microsoft— thanks to Novell and Corel doing interoperability work for them — or being stuck in some ODF ghetto, unable to read Microsoft documents. Everyone wants to interoperate. The question is how. The problem is Microsoft. The solution lies with Microsoft. It’s 2007, and it’s time that Microsoft followed the same standards everyone else, instead of insisting the world bend to their ways. Microsoft’s OXML doesn’t disrupt this propensity. It’s not only unacceptable, but quite strange that even now we can’t all freely share documents with one another, no matter what operating system we like to use. We can send each other email, read each others’ blogs and websites, even if you are on Windows, I’m on Linux, and Uncle Fester is using OS X. Why isn’t that the norm for everything? It ought to be. The bottleneck is Microsoft. FOSS software is happy to interoperate with any other software. Why won’t Microsoft? That is the $64,000 question in 2007. All this only matters if you intend to use Microsoft Word. The good news is that there are many good alternatives” (DonationCoder.com, 2007.02.16).

What do you think?

Okay I know everyone has their own list of favorite Firefox addons (extensions), and that this topic has been posted on Digg.com so many times that is now the subject of jokes and jabs, and I also know many of us have already discovered “the best ones” such that we already have many of the same ones installed anyway…

Yet right now I am faced with having just installed Firefox on my new Kubuntu (Ubuntu) box, and thought I would finally document which addons I like most because everyonce in awhile I go through the process of reinstalling an operating system or Firefox and it would help if I had this information somewhere with the links to the appropriate addons for convenience.

So without further delay here are the essential Firefox addons that I really like and either use every hour throughout the day or that I like to have installed for the sake of curiosity. I’ll list them in the order I use them most frequently.

1. Adblock Plus and Noscript: These two addons are just so essential, so fundamental to improving security and my browsing experience that I just do not even like to go out browsing the Internet without them. Both projects are actively maintained and have demonstrated they are worthy of being trusted on my computer. I then disable messages about javascript being blocked because this is obvious enough from looking at the state of the icon.
   1. Preferences: I like to configure both Adblock and Noscript so that they appear in the bottom right corner of my browser window.
2. Copy Plain Text: Next on the list is the most simple and useful addon I use numerous times during any given hour. Basically this one is essential for any student required to copy and paste quotes (properly cited of course) in any writing assignment. If you are stuck using Microsoft Word you will be especially grateful for this extension in how it effectively strips all formatting from the source with frequently causes Microsoft Word to stall while attempting to do some kind of reverse internet address lookup or something. But even if you have liberated yourself from dependence on Microsoft Word, this addon provides the benefit of importing text from the clip board while retaining the formating or style you have currently selected in your document. Indispensible.
3. Copy URL +: This is another addon extension that I use fairly constantly throughout the day. It basically allows me to capture a selection of text to the clipboard including the title and url of the source. There is one problem however, and that is that the original author has not updated the addon to work with Firefox 2.0. This is simple enough to fix however, and thus I have rolled my own version which can be downloaded here. As for how the extention works, here is an example of copy and pasted text:
   1. FAA May Ditch Microsoft’s Windows Vista And Office 2007 For Google Apps on Linux
      “March is coming in like a lion for Microsoft’s public sector business. Days after InformationWeek reported that the Department of Transportation has placed a moratorium on upgrades to Windows Vista, Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7, the top technology official at the Federal Aviation Administration revealed that he is considering a permanent ban on the Microsoft software in favor of a combination of Google’s new online business applications running on Linux-based hardware.”

      http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=197800480

1. Vista failed to recognize my USB memory stick (rebooting to Kubuntu Linux I was able use it again).
2. Browsing to a PDF file, Vista had no idea what to do with it–even when I saved it to the desktop and clicked on it (out of the box Kubuntu Linux opened it in the most useful PDF viewer (Kpdf) I have ever seen–referring to the awsomely efficient select tool).
3. Installing previous applications, they now fail to start–some complaining of missing MSVCR71.dll, while others complain that .NET 1.1 or greater is required (!?!).
   1. Using Google I found the following help: “I ran into a missing msvcr71.dll while trying to use Password Safe. Since I was dual booting with XP on another partition, I copied over the file from \Windows\System32 on the XP partition. Next it was msvcp70.dll and then finally msvcp71.dll. After that the application came up fine. Soooo…if you’re missing any of these three, grab a copy of them from an XP installation and just simply drop them into \Windows\system32 in the Vista partition…” (source).
   2. Using WinXP to patch up Vista solved the missing dll dilema (twenty minutes later). Now I just need to figure out how Vista either managed to come out without .NET installed (can you imagine?), or how it somehow managed to hide what version it had from applications that ran comfortably on WinXP… Wow…
4. The poorly rendered fonts are really beginning to bother me (Kubuntu Linux offers no such visual grief). Did I mention the blurry fonts are getting really tiresome yet?
5. I installed Office 2007–Outlook is unable to connect to our Exchange server with the exact same settings I have in Outlook 2003 on my other system. Out of the box experience? Broken.
6. Finally I had to give up testing for the day as my eyes couldn’t take it anymore.
7. Giving my eyes a break, I rebooted to Kubuntu Linux… Whew time to be productive again…

Another situation I regularly see many users struggling with is trying to embed movies in PowerPoint presentations at home, taking their presentation to school, and finding out their videos won’t display properly.

Put simply, the problem most often comes up because they created their videos for PowerPoint on an Apple computer at home, and then brought their presentation to school to present on a Win32 computer. Sometimes though, even the Win32 machine they started on just simply used different codecs than the one they wound up using for their presentation. What’s going on here?

Commercial vendors have a vested interest in locking you into a dependency of licensing “their software” for creating and viewing “your” content. The problem is practically no vendor will provide the means to do all of this in a platform neutral manner–that would mean they would have to potentially “share” their customers.

What we need then is a recipe, a path to follow if you will, that will help us navigate the process of creating content that is platform neutral, and the Xvid data format provides us with just that. Why? Because XviD is opensource, a product of community effort, and a gift without any strings attached.

Here is how to get started with Win32 so that videos created in this manner will be both viewable and editable within Linux or OSX. Later I hope to provide the same type of recipe for Linux and OSX, but for now this will meet my immediate need to help some users that are currently having difficulties in the Win32 environment.

1. Install XviD: “XviD is a video codec for PC, whereas codec is an abbreviation for [co]der/[dec]oder, hence describes a program to encode and decode digital video. The purpose of encoding video data is to reduce redundancies – that means to make it smaller for faster transmission over computer networks or for more efficient storage on computer disks. Xvid is open-source software published under the GNU GPL license” (Xvid.org).
   
2. Install 7-zip (optional)
3. GSpot is a program that will allow you to determine exactly what codec is required to play a particular video file.
1. Download GSpot and unzip files to a folder to run from (ie. c:\apps\GSpot).
2. Do the same thing for C:\apps\GSpot\GSpot.exe and drag that shortcut to your desktop.
3. Double-click on your new shortcut for GSpot and run it.
4. Click on Options, then uncheck and re-check the third box from the bottom (Add [or remove] GSpot “Open With”. This will add GSpot to the list of applications to choose from when you right-click on a video file.
5. Right-click on a video file and choose “Open With: Choose Program”
6. Choose GSpot from the list.
7. Now anytime you find yourself wondering what type of file format a video is in, just right-click on a video file and choose “Open With”, GSpot will be listed along with the short-cuts.
4. “VirtualDubMod is a unification of several popular modifications of the famous video editing software VirtualDub by Avery Lee. It started out as a unification of three projects, VirtualDubMPeg2, VirtualDubOGM and VirtualDubAVS. But since then a lot of new features have been introduced” (FAQ).
1. Download VirtualDubMod and unzip files to a folder to run from (ie. c:\apps\VirtualDubMod).
2. Right-click on C:\apps\VirtualDubMod\VirtualDubMod.exe and choose “create shortcut” and drag it to your desktop.
3. Run VirtualDubMod and open a Quicktime or other proprietary video file from the menu.
4. Now click on the File menu and select “Save as”.
1. type in the desired filename
2. Click on button to “Change” the “Compression” to XviD MPEG-4 Codec (XVID).
3. Select XviD MPEG-4 Codec
1. Click on Configure and note that you can also adjust the quality (ie. filesize) of the output.
4. Output your shiny new cross-platform video!
5. Done.

Next time I will show you how to do the same thing using Linux. :-)