! July 1st, 2007 30 days with ubuntu. – Part 3 of 4. Click 1 or 2 to see my previous entries. Week Three I don’t have any freelance work this week, so I decided to shut down the iMac and see how I held up. I exported all my Aperture photos (just for the sake of putting F-Spot through it’s paces, I will never abandon Aperture for my RAW photography needs), iTunes music, e-mail, and whatnot and wanted to see if, on a day-to-day basis, Ubuntu would hold up. I didn’t miss a beat with music or video.

Exaile or Rhythmbox both are great, simple music players that don’t suck up resources, and hide away when not in use. Exaile is more robust in it’s ability to look up lyrics, album covers, and even wikipedia entries for artists you’re listening to, but so far I haven’t picked a winner between that and the tried-and-true iTunes style interface of Rhythmbox, which is simple, clean, and effective. I’ve got about 5 gigs of music on here that i’ve been swapping to and from the firewire drive with all my iTunes library on it. The one complaint is actually Apple’s fault, but is something that would make my life even easier – with iTunes 7, Apple ‘broke’ (read: closed off) 3rd party DAAP sharing over a local network.

In other words, I can browse to, and find, my shared music on my iMac … but I’m not allowed to listen to it. Hopefully Apple wises up and works with open standards (as they love to claim), or someone reverse-engineers a way to listen to shared music. iPod support is great – plug it in, and bam – it shows up in Rhythmbox instantly. You can only manually manage the iPod, as in dragging music to and from the player.

But still, really nice that it works out of the box like that. For my video needs, I use VLC, much like I do on the Mac. Nothing new here. It basically plays every format of video you can throw at it, no questions asked.

I also have Democracy Player installed, which allows me to subscribe to video podcasts and such. Since Ubuntu is based on free software and is intended for worldwide audiences, they cannot include the DVD playback for restricted formats by default. But it’s an easy fix.

Open your terminal and type: $gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources. list add the following lines and then save: Medibuntu – Ubuntu 7.04 “feisty fawn” Please report any bug on [link] deb [link] feisty free non-free deb-src [link] feisty free non-free import the gpg key so the software updater can authenticate with the server: wget -q [link] -O- | sudo apt-key add – update your sources: sudo apt-get update and then install the codecs: sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs Voila! Sending and receiving email couldn’t’ be a whole lot easier, as I primarily use Gmail.

I exported my 6000 emails from my iMac, again, just to see how Evolution (a la MS Outlook) or Mozilla Thunderbird would hold up on here. I don’t really have any intention of using it as my day-to-day email/calendar/contacts program – I actually set up Gmail as my default mail client, despite the fact I dumped a bunch of email on here. Evolution was snappy, and has a pretty clean and easy to understand interface.

Very similarly to Outlook, there are panes on the left-hand side that outline basic tasks – Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Memos, and Tasks. I imported my contacts into Evolution as well, and it has a very similar … I might even say “inspired” Outlook appearance in almost every way. Not that imitation is a bad thing in this instance.

Users, especially ones who are switching from Windows or the Mac – need as few barriers as possible to using new software, despite potentially unfamiliar names of the software. Beagle was able to search the email quickly and thoroughly, along with my contacts. Pressing F12 brings up beagle search dialog, and lets you search all the data one could possibly want access to – emails, contacts, bookmarks, videos, music, and much more.

I did hit a snag with photos, and I’m still trying to get this one solved. For the sake of seeing how F-Spot would handle my pictures, I exported my photos from Aperture in JPEG format, and tried to import them. As soon as I began to bring them all in, the program slowed down and chugged until I got an error message, telling me I was ‘out of memory’. I’ve looked into this, and it’s a bug in libexif, the open source library that handles EXIF data importing.

Some part of the data Aperture puts into the photos makes any photo app (not just F-Spot) choke when trying to load the files. Apparently, the next release of this library has fixed this bug and should get me well on my way. I have, however, imported photos from my SD1000 my Rebel XT, and it works great.

F-Spot is very similar to iPhoto, and is a relatively new project, so it should only improve over time. I’m excited to see what happens with libexif, so I can really put the app thru it’s paces. I’m sure most readers have heard of OpenOffice.

This software is top-notch, at least on Ubuntu. I’ve seen it on Windows and it’s rather slow and ghastly