Trying The Linux Switch Again

[Snorkasaurus]

Okay folks, I like the politics and business policies of Linux enough to give it another shot on my laptop... obviously Microsoft isn't going to do anything to encourage me to stay with XP! In the past I may have mentioned that one of my least favourite things about Linux on a laptop is the ability to manage wireless network connections, so my solution is to use Win7 [muttering profanity] as a VirtualBox host to a Linux guest and an XP guest to get me over the hump. My hope is that one day I will just tire of my XP guest and delete it. In this post I will document my ability to replace each of the functions that XP is currently providing (with the help of a number of applications obviously). Perhaps if it goes well, others will feel encouraged to try to make their own migration, or at least give a Linux VM a chance.


I should note that I am trying Xubuntu 12 for this experiment. It is the previous LTS (Long Term Support) version which is officially supported for another year from now. I don't feel any pressing need to always have the newest hardware, operating system, or applications. Xubuntu uses Debian's Synaptic/apt as its package management system, it has more up to date packages than Debian does, and xfce is able to work nicely on sub-current hardware. I do not like Xubuntu's default setup of a limited user account that uses sudo to perform administrative tasks but will try to live with it for now.

Successfully Replaced
Here are the functions I have successfully been able to transfer to a Linux based environment. I'll start by saying that I used to be a fan of FireFox up until version 2.0.20 after which it took a wrong turn down Awesome Bar Blvd. My answer to this was to switch to SeaMonkey which is also made by Mozilla but includes a "suite" of applications including chat client, email client, html editor (sort of), address book, etc. The bad news is that SeaMonkey started to suffer some of FireFox's same fate after version 2.8 - so that is what I run as a browser. It is still able to use a number of FireFox addons which is one of FF's strongest features and in my current Linux adventure I am hopefully going to migrate a significant number of my functions to addons if I can.

- Ad blocking, cookie management, browser: obviously this is all SeaMonkey and it was quite easy to simply use the Linux port of it with my existing XPI addons that I used to use in Windows. XPI addons are just renamed ZIP files and this part of the transition was obviously the easiest.
- Weather & Calendar: On XP I was using Weather Watcher and Windates for these functions. I was able to replace both of these with SeaMonkey addons... ForecastFox and ReminderFox. ForecastFox has buttons for "show hourly forecast" and "show 5 day forecast" that I wish were menu items (which would take up less status bar real estate) and ReminderFox has ugly icons and does not support email reminders... but I think I can live with both of them.
- email client: I have my issues with email clients as it is, so switching to webmail was the best I could come up with. Thunderbird is a joke, in fact ANY email application that just asks you for your email address and then goes hunting for open ports on a server can kiss my ass. Any decent email client should also allow you to create aliases that do not disclose your primary email address. Since I run my own email server I was able to just add Roundcube webmail service and now I use that. Sadly I had to use an older version but I will deal with that later. Oh, I should add that RoundCube is also my address book as well.
- Video player: The good news is that VLC is included in the default installation of Xubuntu. The bad news is that it is not the default player (Parole is just awful) and it doesn't seem to be able to play video across my network (I'll have to look in to that later)
- Screeshooter: Hurray, the one that comes with Xubuntu is pretty good. Basic, just what I wanted.


Still to work on
Here are the apps I still need help with... suggestions welcome of course!

- PDF reader: Haven't even bothered to see what Xubuntu offers by default. I imagine that this won't be tough, I never edit PDFs so all I need is a light application that allows me to set a default display of single page, non-continuous, fit page - and the ability to zoom, rotate page, and search content.
- Text editor: I am sure I will need to find something for this. I would like context highlighting, line numbering and tabbed documents. Notepad++ is my current Windows favourite and I haven't even checked yet to see if there is a Linux port for it.
- Google Drive: I occasionally store a few stupid videos in Google Docs and then embed them in to web sites. I gave up on YouTube when they insisted on having a Google+ account and they block videos if they find even the slightest hint of intellectual property infringement (like we really need more Internet police ensuring that I can't include 12 seconds of a Family Guy episode in my joke video). Anyways, Google Docs is able to provide craploads of bandwidth, the familiar YouTube player layout, and easy embedding... I am quite open to suggestions other than Google Docs if anyone can suggest something that doesn't bomb functionality.
- Image editor: This one will probably be a problem. I hate GIMP. I mean REALLY hate GIMP. I like to think that I am as smart as the next guy with a picnic basket, but GIMP makes me feel like a moron. For example, here's how my experience went today with it. I had a photo from my Kodak DX7680 camera and I wanted to crop it to 16:9 aspect ratio, resize it to 1280 wide, remove the EXIF information disclosure tags, and upload it to my favourite pr0n site. Cropping to 16:9 wasn't too bad but once I noticed that I could set a fixed aspect ratio in the Toobox window (but the option does not seem to be accessible from the main window at all). Then scaling it to 1280 wide worked but left me with a large white area around the image. It seems unusual to me that one would want to resize and image and not resize the canvas underneath. I saw no way to modify or remove the EXIF embedded information, and finally uploading it was pretty much what I expected. On XP I use FastStone which is much smaller, quicker within the same resources, has no dependencies, and is easier to find common functions. I have at some point in the past got FastStone to work via Wine but had issues with making it the default application for certain file types.
- PGP: I use PGP v5.5.3i on XP and would like to find a decent replacement. I am aware of GPG but worry that the interface is going to disappoint me... I guess I shouldn't make up my mind before I try it eh.
- Full disk encryption: I use TrueCrypt to encrypt my entire Windows based drive, but system drive encryption is not available in the Linux port. If I recall correctly there is a way to do this with LVM but would need to be done when the OS is installed (which I have already done). I'd really like some suggestions on this one!
- Local web server: This one might be a little weird... In my constant quest to dump trackers, cookies, junkware, and retards I have setup hosts files and local DNS servers with intentionally poisoned entries that point to 127.0.0.1 - that way when my browser (or other application) is pointed at these crappy hosts, I never find them. On XP I have an application called Homer that is a very small web server that serves up only a single 1x1 transparent GIF for any request sent to it which essentially makes web-crapware invisible. Any thoughts?
- Download Manager: Since browsers (including SeaMonkey) are totally incapable of scheduling and/or rate limiting downloads I would like to find something that can do it for me. I don't much care if it can handle torrents, just be able to manage downloads better than SeaMonkey alone. The minimal searching I have done suggests that no addon exists for SeaMonkey or FireFox that can do it... apparently a previous addon called FireFox Throttle was able to some speed limiting but was actually a separate Windows application. Seems odd to me that I can't just pull down a box on my download window that lets me select a speed to limit it at.
- CD/DVD burning: Xubuntu comes with xfburn which I haven't given a serious chance yet, I am hoping it will serve the purpose. All I really need is the ability to burn an ISO image or a collection of files to a physical disk, or to write a disk image from physical disk or collection of files.
- WinSCP: WinSCP has an extremely powerful scripting feature that I have never seen in another application on any platform. I believe it was gFTP that I tried a long time ago and liked, though it still doesn't have the scripting abilities of WinSCP. I did a few quick searches and found that Filezilla has a Linux port so that might suffice. Finally, if I can get WinSCP working under wine I might be happy enough.

Wow... that was a fair bit to digest. hope nobody fell asleep reading that. :-)
Snork.

[Snorkasaurus]

I forgot to mention:

- RDP client: I am pretty sure that rdesktop will work just fine.

S. :-)

[R_Head]

K3B to burn disks works wonders

[Snorkasaurus]

K3B to burn disks works wonders

Hey R_Head,

Thanks for the tip... I checked it out and sure enough Xubuntu has it in its repositories, the bad news is that it needs over 200M of KDE related dependencies as well. I may go back and try it if I can't find anything else that suits.

S.

[Snorkasaurus]

Did a little more playing today...

There are some things about Thunar that I don't like (such as showing tree or shortcuts in the left pane but not both) but I think that with the help of xfe I'll be okay. With my file manager application needs dealt with I moved on to a PDF reader which I thought would be easy. I tried whatever I could find in Synaptic and that was a total bust, the notes I took as I went along started like this:

- evince is just awful
- okular requires 192M of dependencies which is ridiculous for a pdf reader
- gv has the most heinous interface I have seen in a long time
- mupdf has no options at all
- gnustep viewpdf requires heavy dependencies

After that I was disappointed enough to quit taking notes. I currently have Adobe Reader v9.5.something installed and it works just fine (though it leaves a distinctly rotten taste in my mouth). I was then lucky to find a port of Notepad++ called Notepadqq... and unlucky to find out that most of it was broken and most features simply didn't work. I tried Bluefish (which is actually in the default Xubuntu repos) and was confused about why it would insist on installing libbluetooth3 as a dependency for a text editor but the total was only 11M so I did it anyways. It was pretty good but still lacks some of the features that Notepad++ has... here's a favourite example of mine: If you highlight some text and hit CTRL-F it will pre-fill the search box with the highlighted text. Then there are a few tabs across the top of the search window, one of which is "Mark". Clicking the Mark tab and hitting the "Mark All" button will bookmark all the lines that have the desired text in them. Then you can quickly remove all these lines by selecting Search -> Bookmark -> Remove bookmarked lines from the menu to dump them all. I use this a couple times a day to remove known IP addresses from my web server logs when I check them (that's right, I check my web server logs daily). Crap... here comes 300M of wine.

S.

[viking60]

... here's a favourite example of mine: If you highlight some text and hit CTRL-F it will pre-fill the search box with the highlighted text.
S.

Geany will do that - it will be in the repos.

It is a handy and powerful Notepad - I use it more than Bluefish these days.
If you press "Mark" in the dialog window you will get all the appearances marked. The lines will be listed in the bottom window under "Messages".
Check out the plugins under "Tools" they will help you customize Geany to your liking.
Digging further...
Okular is good and flexible but needs more dependencies in XFCE than in KDE because I think it is originally a KDE program.
On the bright side; XFCE will still be more light-weight than KDE -even with Okular.

Regarding your encryption:
I think Truecrypt is the best if you are not doing it during install (which is the best). I have put my Dropbox in a Truecrypt folder. I have installed Manjaro with disk encryption and that is a system encryption (dm-crypt/LUKS).
It encrypts /, SWAP and HOME.
You can check it with

Code: Select all

lsblk

[Snorkasaurus]

Geany will do that - it will be in the repos.

Hmmm, it is certainly better than any of the other editors I have seen so far. I had a bit of a shaky start but once that was repaired I was on my way. I am able to highlight a piece of text, then hit CTRL-SHIFT-M to highlight all occurrences of it. If I hit "Mark" in the search window I get nothing in my Messages tab, however if I hit "In Document" I do get each line showing up in my Messages tab.

Unfortunately I haven't found a way to delete all lines with the occurring text yet (only a way to highlight multiple instances of text). I tried the NumberedBookmarks plugin but that wasn't what I thought it might be. Unfortunately hitting F1 or clicking on the help menu produced no effect so I couldn't really tell if manipulation of bookmarked lines is a core feature or not (though I could see that bookmarking obviously is). So I tried geany-plugin-addons because it seems to have a component called "Bookmark List"... didn't actually notice any effect (yes, I did activate it in the Plugin Manager).

Is it possible to delete all lines containing a piece of text in Geany?

S.

[Snorkasaurus]

Today's update:

I tried v60's Geany text editor but I am pretty sure that it doesn't have a way to bookmark lines with certain text or remove all bookmarked lines. I gave in and setup 300M of wine and Notepad++ which had some trouble with the file associations at first but magically started working on its own.

Filezilla didn't even come close to WinSCP, and since I had already donated 300M of drive space to wine I figured I would try WinSCP which seems to be working fine.

This leaves me with the following still to find solutions for:
[list][*]Google Drive
[*]Image editor
[*]PGP
[*]Full disk encryption
[*]Small local web server
[*]Download manager

The jury is still out on the CD/DVD/ISO application, I might like xfburn enough to stick with it.

S.

[viking60]

Mostly you are trying to transfer your Windows habits to Linux.
WinSCP is great in Windows but in Linux you have SSH at your Fingertips in a terminal. That is where SSH is powerful.
You can use Thunar to connect to servers by typing the address like this:

Code: Select all

ssh://198.10.11.0.1

that will mount your remote box and give you drag and drop access.
The remote box will be stored under NETWORK.

Nobody should use anything less secure than SSH/SFTP.

I have not found a way to mark and delete entire lines in Geany (I never have the need to remove entire lines) but I guess you could make a macro for it.

[Snorkasaurus]

Mostly you are trying to transfer your Windows habits to Linux.

I am actually trying to transfer my Windows "functions" to Linux, the SSH related functions I am looking for here are (1) automated backups and (2) drag n' drop remote file management. The file management part is relatively straightforward but the automated backup scripts might be a little more complicated... WinSCP will log in nightly to a remote server via SSH on a non-standard port with passwordless key (not named id_rsa) authentication and check a number of directories recursively, then download and update only the changed files. Of course this is done scheduled and unattended. Is there a way to do that?

You can use Thunar to connect to servers by typing the address like this:

Code: Select all

ssh://198.10.11.0.1

that will mount your remote box and give you drag and drop access.
The remote box will be stored under NETWORK.

Can this be done with key authentication, on a non-standard port, with a key that is not named id_rsa? I can get it to work in a terminal with

Code: Select all

ssh user@server -p 1234 -i /home/user/.ssh/fancyuser.rsa

but Thunar doesn't seem to have a way to do this.

Nobody should use anything less secure than SSH/SFTP.

S.

[viking60]

I am actually trying to transfer my Windows "functions" to Linux, the SSH related functions I am looking for here are (1) automated backups and (2) drag n' drop remote file management. The file management part is relatively straightforward but the automated backup scripts might be a little more complicated... WinSCP will log in nightly to a remote server via SSH on a non-standard port with passwordless key (not named id_rsa) authentication and check a number of directories recursively, then download and update only the changed files. Of course this is done scheduled and unattended. Is there a way to do that?

Sure I am doing it with our Berserk script:
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1088&start=24#p7210
5 boxes get backed up every day without me noticing.
You will find the finished version and description on Github:

https://github.com/viking60/berserk_stuff
Here is the Wiki:
https://github.com/viking60/berserk_stuff/wiki/Backup

To set up passwordless SSH (the most secure way) check here:
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=679#p7017

[viking60]

I forgot about Scite
It is the Notepad++ for Linux. But as I recall it it is way more powerfull than NP++

I used it back in my Windows days....

I think I have found a perfect distro for you too I am wrapping up a review on it as we "speak".....