Wine

Expanding on the Wine talk, why don't we discuss why Wine is useful. Well, I personally know that it's making my transition much easier. There are tons of free and open-source programs available for Linux, and in this case, that may be working both for and against me. Given the vast amount of Linux software, I'm bound to find a program that's suitably equivalent to the programs I formerly used on Windows; but at the same time, it may take me a while to finally find that program. Until I do find these alternatives, Wine may allow you to use your Windows programs either indefinitely, or until you come across a Linux-based one. Currently, that's what I'm doing with a few programs. As I mentioned before I use both HashX and (to a lesser extent) Easy Duplicate Finder. In addition, I use Bulk Rename Utility, which as the name suggests, allows me to easily rename several files at once. I understand that there's Métamorphose, but I haven't tried that yet. Now I don't necessarily use these just because I'm used to them or haven't found a Linux-equivalent; in some cases, the Linux equivalents are inferior to their Window counterparts. For example, I feel that the free Paint.NET is superior to GIMP, even if GIMP has many more features—mostly it's because Paint.NET has an easier-to-use interface. It has one window, with four others (toolbox, color editor, history, and layer manager) inside it, vs. GIMP's multi-window configuration. But also, tools in Paint.NET are more intuitive, and thus easier, to use. You select a tool from the toolbox—say the selection tool—and the more refined settings for that tool appear on the top toolbar. There, I can easily decide whether to replace an existing selection area with a new one, add a selection to an existing one, subtract a selection area from an existing one, etc. Unfortunately, as the name implies, Paint.NET is reliant upon Microsoft's .NET architecture, which makes it more difficult than usual to port the program to Linux. As of now, all I now is that some have worked on a version of Paint.NET for Linux that uses Mono in place of .NET, with decent, but not preferable, results. As such, I'm stuck with GIMP (in Linux, anyway), and will be for the foreseeable future :( I really hope that GIMP's development team can fix GIMP's interface enough that it's less reliant on menus and generally more like Paint.NET's—for the end-user's sake, you know? So Wine doesn't work with every Windows program out there, but with time and/or luck, your favorite Windows program may work well with it. Wine's website, , maintains a database of programs and their status (i.e., whether they work or not), so you can use that resource to find out whether others have been successful in using a certain program with Wine. Of course, the database may contain outdated information, and also it wouldn't be uncommon for your specific program to not be listed, so you can always try the program yourself. Good luck :)

Windows Programs, Their Extensions, and Wine

Some people feel that Windows should just die. And its little programs too. Others, however, rely on certain “exclusive” Windows programs, whether it's because of their employer or their own personal taste. While I personally look forward to going completely Linux, there are still a few programs in Windows that I feel are superior to current Linux alternatives. For those, I must run them with the help of Wine (or a virtual machine, but that's beyond this article), a program (that's not an emulator) that allows you to run many Windows programs within Linux. Now, given the fact that there are so many programs exclusively on Windows, your obscure tax form application most likely won't be supported in Wine. Many of those programs are so tied to the Windows way of doing things that the more complex ones most likely won't be compatible. I personally have had some success with some of the smaller programs I used pretty extensively in Windows. HashX, a program I use to compare files I download to the originals, ensuring that I received the file intact and as the author intended; and Easy Duplicate Finder, a program that helps identify any duplicate files I may have so that I can delete them (although FSLint, for Linux, seems to have a decent duplicate finder component as well), are two examples.

One thing I noticed, though, was that when I double-clicked on one of the programs running with Wine, I would get a pop-up message stating that the content of the file didn't match its extension (.exe). As a result, I had to manually right-click the file and choose to run it with Wine in order to use it. This was pretty annoying. Thankfully, the fix was easy: all I had to do was rename the files by deleting the “.exe” part, and then I was successfully able to run them by double-clicking.

One of the many things I like about Ubuntu is that it doesn't necessarily need a file to have an extension to function—rather, it simply looks at the file content to determine which application should open it. For instance, a simple text file named “README” would open up just fine in gedit (or your preferred text editor) under Ubuntu, but it would choke up Windows, and you'd be required to add a file extension in order to use it (unless you right-clicked the file and manually opened it with a specific program). So it looks like the concept works similarly for Wine-driven programs, with the difference that you pretty much must remove the file extension if you want to be able to run a program by simply double-clicking it.

My Blog's Automatically Resizing!

In case you're wondering why my blog template may seem to have different dimensions than the original version of the template (called “No. 897”), it's true. I have a rather large widescreen computer monitor (1680x1050 resolution), and as I was first previewing my blog, I was shocked to find that in this day and age, the template didn't proportionally resize to fit my monitor by default. What this meant was that my posts were tall and skinny, and there was plenty of unused space on the left and right. This issue doesn't affect 1024x768 monitors—the most common—since the template seemed specifically suited for them; but as a widescreen monitor owner, I personally understand how others with widescreen monitors feel when websites don't scale to fit different-dimensioned monitors, and so I've done what I can to make any blog or website I put on the Web dynamically suit each monitor dimension (to an extent). In other words, my blogs and websites aren't suited for just standard or widescreen monitors—it should work well with all monitors (except extremely wide, tall, small, or large ones). So I hope that this doesn't cause you any discomfort; just understand that I'm trying to appeal to many people at once :)

On to the first tip . . . Exiting Linux Manuals

Okay, so with all that said, I'll finally get to the first tip :) Have you ever been typing some commands in the terminal and then got to reading Linux manuals (a.k.a. "man" or "man pages"), only to find yourself unable to get back to the previous screen? For instance, many times before I've typed in a few commands and then read a certain command's manual to find out more about it, but when I wanted to get back to the usable terminal, I couldn't! The best I could ever do was close the existing terminal window and open a new one. But I got so frustrated with having to do that, and I couldn't imagine that there wasn't an easier way to work in the terminal. So I finally broke down and . . . searched for an answer. It didn't help that the first few searches yielded no helpful results, but I persisted, and I'm glad I did; I finally found a webpage that referenced this very issue! It turns out that all you have to do is press "q"! That's right--you don't have to keep closing terminal windows each time you want to go back to the regular terminal window. Just press "q", and you just saved yourself a real hassle :) By the way, the winning combination of search words was: Ubuntu how to exit return terminal which led to <http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/11/01/how-to-exit-a-man-page/>. Keep in mind that this single, first tip won't necessarily give an indication of the variety of future tips and tricks, so if you're even just slightly interested, you might want to periodically check back so you can see for yourself if this blog is what you're looking for. For now, it looks like I'll be posting once a week, but that's only a general rule.

A Little History . . .

        Before I go off spewing the tips and tricks that will make this blog, you might want to know a little more about me and how I got into FOSS.         As I said before, I'm a college student—community college student, to be exact. Like many of my peers, the only OS I really knew was Windows, back when I was just an average computer user. I took a typing class and two programming classes in high school, but over the recent years I took a much larger (and perhaps broader) interest in computers and computer-related things. It wasn't until around the Fall of 2006 that I seemed to be really (really) serious about computers, however. At that point, I was mostly just looking forward getting Vista and Office 2007 the following January. I got a new graphics card since it was on sale. But I didn't actually ravenously rummage through the Internet to learn as much as I could about computers yet.         When I finally got Vista and Office 2007, I was certainly impressed by the eye-candy, but I certainly experienced major problems as well. Admittedly, I had followed the instructions of Microsoft tech support and upgraded Vista over my (crapware-laden) copy of XP, so that didn't help at all. On my own, I fresh installed Vista a little bit later, and that got rid of some problems. But then I got some extra RAM to boost the performance of my computer, and unbeknownst to me it seemed to be the cause of many a Blue Screen of Death! I didn't do anything about the RAM, though; it wasn't until later reformats, which I came to habitually perform every couple of months, that Vista didn't crash any more.         All this while I had been sitting on the conflict of whether I should install my graphics card (which I was worried I'd do wrong), or have a professional do it for me. It took me half a year to finally decide, but I'm a cheapskate, so I installed it myself after researching a little more into the process. I had been concerned that I'd render my computer unusable since it might not display anything on the monitor any more, but nothing went wrong. This, the RAM issue, and my experience reformatting my OS (which was a pretty advanced thing for me at the time :P) all boosted my confidence in regards to working with computers. Next, I wanted to try out lots of software to experiment with them and learn in the process.         I would download free (and trialware) utilities mostly, but I also went from Internet Explorer to Firefox too :) I liked to read more about the various workings of Windows, such as the registry, and I finally felt comfortable modifying it (but only because nothing bad happened when I did :P). I also learned about Ubuntu and other free and open-source software. However, it wasn't until I just got fed up with software activations (those frequent Windows reformats were a problem) that I seriously considered using Linux as my main platform. I'd off-and-on been using Ubuntu LiveCDs to test it out, but at this time I used it like crazy and wanted to learn more and more about it. I started downloading tons of FOSS for it, and if there were Windows versions available, I would use them in Windows. For documents and other office-related files, I started using open formats (i.e., .ods, .odt) for new files, and I converted old files to open formats. Microsoft will not own my stuff!         That pretty much leads to now. I am certain I will move over to Ubuntu (or another Linux derivative) sometime this year—I'm just not sure when yet. My wireless adapter currently doesn't work in Gutsy, so I'll need to either work with "ndiswrapper", wait for Hardy to come out (assuming the wireless adapter will work with it right away), or find another Linux distro that supports it. Other than that, though, I think I'm pretty much all set with the transition: I'm familar with OpenOffice in both Windows and Linux (though in some ways, Gnumeric beats Calc); I'm familiar with using the terminal to install software (although I prefer to use Synaptic in Ubuntu when I can), copy and move files, and access files and folders with root; and once I can get my wireless adapter to work, I'll be able to access the Internet (which, honestly, at least 90% of my work depends on). I wish more hardware vendors would provide official Linux support, but I'm happy to say that even without their support, I'll be moving to Linux soon :)

Welcome!

        Hello, anyone :) I'm a young college student who as of late has become very interested in Linux and other Free and Open-Source software. It's a completely new, refreshing, and indeed interesting world that I'm glad I happened upon. My experience hasn't always been very easy, but luckily I'm so fascinated by it that I have plenty of motivation to spare. I recognize that others may not be the same way, however, so they might need a helping hand to guide them. Even experienced users can benefit from a few tips or tricks here and there as well. So I've decided to make my very own blog for these kind of people, as well as myself.         This blog will be used to provide any tips or tricks that I may come across on a forum, another blog, website, etc., or that I've discovered firsthand. You can expect that these tips and tricks will be random since I only document those things that I don't already know or that I feel I may have difficulty remembering. For instance, the type of material you can expect to find here will range from Linux OS's to other free and open-source software (mostly for Linux OS's) to anything else I deem relevant. Therefore, I don't really have a set schedule in terms of when I post. That may make it sound like this blog is for me more than you . . . perhaps it is. But along the way, I'm more than happy to share the information with you. I understand how frustrating it can be working with unfamiliar software.         Feel free to comment on my posts, as well. I'd wager most new and important tips and tricks are provided by posters than the actual blogger, and blogs can be a very good source for this kind of information. I hope you enjoy mine :)

Just a test . . .

Fedora Test

This post is merely a test of whether Fedora 8's "Blog Entry Poster" works properly, and if so, in what way.

EDIT: Well, it looks like it worked!