[frgeek-michiana] 30 Days of VL 5.8 - part 3
- From: Tom Brown <tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FreeGeek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2007 19:22:42 -0500
PART 3
:: Day 22 - May 30
I composed the Lab Notes for last night on Victor The Vector Linux box
and transferred them my file server. At lab, we talked briefly about the
choice of apps in VL and PL. Nobody spoke well of the SeaMonkey
(Netscape) suite. Consequently, I am considering importing my browser
bookmarks and cookies and my email folders and addresses from Firefox
and Thunderbird on a venerable Windows 98 box to SeaMonkey on this,
Victor the Vector Linux FreeBox. Such a move will leave me more
dependent on VL and give me a better perspective on the distribution.
I suspect SeaMonkey is generally acceptable for a new user. Dale, the
newest Linux user among us, doesn't like it so I have to take that into
account.
I remember reading somewhere that SeaMonkey was chosen over standalone
packages because the total footprint of SeaMonkey is less than the sum
of the standalone apps which have been growing in size as they evolve.
Development and testing time were probably improved by choosing the
integrated suite as well.
:: Day 23 - May 31
No Floppy
As I booted Victor today, I watched udev lines for errors related to the
missing floppy drive. And I found one.
Google is your friend.
The missing floppy is caused by a udev rule symlink parameter which
recreates a file that already exists. The result nullifies /dev/floppy
in udev.
The solution is easy: Delete the offending symlink parameter in
/etc/udev/rules.d/udev.rules.
# floppy devices
KERNEL=="fd[0-9]*",
NAME="floppy/%n",
GROUP="floppy",
SYMLINK+="%k",
PROGRAM="/lib/udev/floppy-extra-devs.sh %k %b %n"
Remove SYMLINK+="%k" and that fixes it.
Day 25 - June 2
I checked one of the FreeBoxes we set up at the warehouse Thursday
evening. It was throwing the same udev error re the floppy drive as
Victor, my test box. Unlike Victor, the other FreeBox found the floppy,
read it and wrote to it in spite of the misformed udev rule. So I didn't
"correct" the rule.
Day 26 - June 3
I decided not to migrate email from Thunderbird on my Win98 box to
SeaMonkey on Victor.
I did the research and made a first pass at exporting the data to
SeaMonkey, and the results were imperfect. There were six files and one
folder to migrate. I lost the filters to sort incoming mail into folders
and the locally trained spam detection database.
Reconstructing the settings and filters is the rub in this exercise: It
is too much effort for the reward.
The whole project is not one a newb is likely to pursue. They'll start
with SeaMonkey and later might select a different OS or email client and
face the migration demon. Their migration should be relatively easy.
Mine is relatively hard because I have years of archived email and
hundreds, if not a thousand, folders. Then there are he filters I've
created to sort incoming email into all these folders.
In the end, it is easier to find an email client you like and stick with
it across distros. This makes migration from one drive to another, from
one computer to another or one OS to another, straightforward.
So, eating my own dog food, I downloaded the Thunderbird 2.0 Linux
tar.gz from the Mozilla web site and installed it. I copied my "profile"
folder from T-Bird on Win98 to T-Bird on VL 5.8. Then, I edited one line
in a config file to tell T-Bird where to find the new profile folder.
Now my addresses, email, settings and filters -- everything I need --
reside on Victor, the Vector Linux FreeBox.
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