9:30 - I didn't get much done yesterday. We left for the funeral around 9:30 and got home about 1:30. Barbara was very upset, of course, but I guess going to the funeral helped her cope with losing Ann.


I have spent a bit of time playing with Linux. I downloaded and installed Ximian Red Carpet, subscribed to the Red Hat 7.2 channel, and told it to download all the updates available. There are more than 200 of them totaling 358 MB. I'm sucking those down now, at 120 KB/s. I have no idea what most of them are for, but I suppose I need them. The next thing I need to do is get Samba set up so that my Linux system can see my Windows systems and vice versa.

I'm going to keep my main Windows 2000 desktop as a crutch until I'm comfortable with Linux. That'll come as I get comfortable with Linux on my secondary desktop system. As that happens, my secondary system will gradually become my primary system. At some point, I'll also take down the Windows system in the den and replace it with a Linux box.


14:45 - I've said all along that my transition from Windows to Linux would be a gradual process. At first, I'd use my main Windows system 90% of the time and my main Linux system only 10% of the time. Gradually, that proportion would be reversed, and I'd be using my main Linux system almost exclusively. I started working with my Linux desktop system yesterday afternoon. It's been a long struggle, but I think I'm almost ready to make my Windows desktop my secondary system and start using my Linux desktop as my primary system. There are a few things I need to do before I can complete the transition, to wit:

1. The big one first. I still haven't been successful in accessing my Windows Networking systems from the Linux system, or vice versa. I need to be able to view Windows shares on my Linux box and vice versa . In the KDE Control Center, there's an option called Network -> LAN Browsing, and another called Windows Shares. Can it really be as simple as configuring those dialogs correctly?
2. I have a DDS-3 tape drive in the Linux box. It would be nice to be able to backup my local system (and, ideally, shares on the Windows network) to that tape drive. Is there a graphical backup application somewhere on my Linux system that I'm missing? I do vaguely remember from the distant past using tar to archive stuff to tape, but I'm hoping there's a tree-structured graphical backup app I can use to archive data to my tape drive.
3. I know there are front-ends for burning CDs. This system has a 12X Plextor writer in it, but I'm not sure how to burn CDs. Any tips greatly appreciated.

There are probably other things I'm overlooking, but these are the main ones for now. I've loaded Ximian Evolution and am able to send and receive mail. I have my real mail store on a Windows box (using Mozilla Mail) right now, so I've told Evolution to leave a copy on the server. Once I get #1 above resolved, I'll move my real mail store over to the Linux box and import it (if necessary) into Evolution. I haven't downloaded OpenOffice for Linux yet, but I've run it on Windows and I'm sure it'll be adequate for what I need to do. Worst case, I'll always have a Windows system running with Office 2000 on it, so weirdly formatted documents shouldn't be a problem.

It seems that I'm on my way to running a Microsoft-free computing environment. And it seems that it's not as painful as I feared it would be. There are pitfalls, certainly, and things I haven't figured out how to do yet. But I'm confident that I'll work my way past those, with a little help from my friends. And I'll be cheating now and then, when there's something I absolutely need to do and haven't figured out how to do in Linux yet, or when I need to run an application like Cartes du Ciel that is available only for Windows. But those Windows systems are now largely just crutches. I know they're there if I need them, but I probably won't need them much.

Now, where do I get those penguin stickers to put on the front of my computer cases?

9:30 - Caught in the act! I've mentioned before that digital cameras are much less suitable for action photography because their latency is much longer than that of standard cameras, but yesterday I managed to catch Malcolm in the act. He's incredibly crafty when it comes to stealing things, and one of his favorite things to steal is paper products--tissues, toilet paper, or paper towels--which he then shreds.

Malcolm is extremely skilled at picking pockets. He often steals things from my pockets without me being aware that he's done so. Pretty incredible, when you consider the size of his snout. The trick is, he proceeds very slowly and carefully. Yesterday, he made a small misstep. As I was sitting at my desk working, I felt something around the pocket of my sweat pants. Not much, mind you, but something. I looked down, and there was Malcolm attempting to extract a paper towel from my pocket.

I happened to have the digital camera sitting within easy reach, so I picked it up, pointed it straight down, and took the photo. That's my light grey t-shirt you see at the bottom of the image. The dark bar at the top left is the arm of my chair. The greenish-blue at center-right is the pocket of my sweat pants, and you can see how far in Malcolm has his snout. It's nearly buried in my pocket.


He'd worked so hard at it that I let him get away with the paper towel, which he took out to the den and shredded. He wasn't satisified with just the one, though. A few minutes later, I heard him moving from behind me, heading for the door of my office. Sure enough, he had yet another paper towel in his mouth. That one he'd stolen without me realizing he'd gotten it.


I'm in the process of converting over to Linux entirely. Thanks to Greg Lincoln, who solved my major problem, at least in part. I wasn't able to access Windows shares from my Linux system. Here's what Greg told me to do:


Which indeed works, but only on Windows NT 4 shares. When I attempt to do that for Windows 2000 shares, I get the following error message, both at boot time and when I try to access the share:


I tried the same thing on other Windows 2000 shares and got the same results. Apparently, Microsoft changed something in Windows 2000 that breaks SAMBA. But that will do, at least for now. I can access my server volumes on theodore, and that's all that really matters.

Right now, I'm running my mail on three different clients with three different mail clients. Until a few minutes ago, I had Mozilla Mail running on messier (my main Windows desktop) set to POP from my server at pair and delete the messages after it retrieved them. I have Evolution running on galileo, also set to POP from pair Networks, but to leave messages on the server. I have Outlook 2000 running on ursa (my Windows 2000 system in the den), also set to POP from pair Networks and leave messages on the server. My main mail store is therefore on messier. I can't figure out how to point Mozilla Mail to a different directory, so I just let it store the mail locally on messier and periodically manually copy and paste the whole mail directory hierarchy over to theodore (the Windows NT 4 Server file server), from which it gets backed up.

I intended to make Evolution my primary mail client last night, and so attempted to import the Mozilla Mail data into Evolution. That didn't work as expected. I ran the import utility and was given the choice of importing all data from an older mail system or doing a file-by-file import. When I chose the first option, I was presented with a blank screen. No joy there. Just to experiment, I told Evolution to do a file-by-file import and pointed it to the Inbox file. That worked fine, so I shouldn't have any problem importing my data, except that I'll have to do it folder by folder (and I have many, many folders). Also, I'm not sure how I'll get my non-mail folders (such as my contacts) into Evolution.

What I considered doing was setting up Mozilla Mail under Linux and then copying all my Mozilla Mail data over from messier to galileo . Presumably that would allow Mozilla running under Linux to see all that data and then subsequently allow Evolution to import it as a batch. The only problem is that I can't make it work. Oh, well. At least I can get my messages over to Evolution, and I should be able to import my addressbooks somehow.


Holden Aust sends me very detailed instructions for burning CDs under Linux. Although it's a long message, there's so much valuable information here that I decided to post his message in full so that I and others can refer to it later.

9:20 - I'd intended for today's entry to be the first one done completely under Linux, but that turned out not to be possible.

I've made a fair amount of progress. My primary mail client is now Evolution running on my Linux box. It's by no means as full-featured as Outlook 2000, but it seems to have all the essentials. I'm really looking forward to Evolution 1.1 or 2.0 or whatever they call it. There are a lot of convenience features that need to be added, and my guess is that the programmers are working on them for the next major release. But Evolution is Good Enough for now.

Among the features they really need to add is a usable Outlook import facility. Mozilla mail imports Outlook messages and address books, so there's no reason why Evolution can't do the same. It is, after all, aimed at the corporate Outlook market, so it's pretty much mandatory that it be able to import data from the application that it's intended to replace. Instead, the current release of Evolution says that it can't read Outlook files, and actually recommends using Mozilla Mail as an intermediary to get Outlook messages into Evolution.

The Outlook-to-Mozilla part works great. Mozilla's import grabs Outlook messages wholesale and puts them (and the folders that contain them) in a separate set of "Imported Mail" folders in Mozilla. It goes downhill from there, though. As far as I can see, there's no way to bulk import the mail from Mozilla to Evolution. Instead, you have to import it folder by folder. That at least does work properly, but it's quite time-consuming to replicate the Outlook/Mozilla folder structure in Evolution and then import folder by folder into Evolution.

What's worse is that there is apparently no way to import address books into Evolution. The best Evolution can come up with is to suggest mailing your contacts to yourself. I couldn't come up with any convenient way to do that in Mozilla, so I fired up Outlook, selected every contact in my Contacts folder, and sent them all as one huge mail message. That arrived in Evolution fine, but there was no way I could find to extract that data from the message and put it into Evolution.

So I decided to try sending my contacts one-by-one as v-card file attachments. Actually, I had too many contacts, so I decided to use my Subscribers list instead. I tried mailing one subscriber record as a vcard, and that worked fine. I opened the message in Evolution, and there was a button at the bottom of the message that said "Add to Addressbook" or something similar. Fine. So I spent the better part of an hour emailing each Subscriber record as an individual v-card attachment. Only after I'd sent them all and retrieved them in Evolution did I learn that the process didn't go as smoothly with most records as it did with that first test record. Evolution did in fact import the v-card data, but the resulting records were incredibly ugly. Each of them took up a full column in Evolution's Contacts display, with lots of little boxes and strange characters in the Notes fields.

After that, I tried everything I could think of, including exporting my Contacts records as comma-separated-value ASCII files. Nothing I tried worked. In each case, Evolution told me that it didn't have an importer for the format I'd chosen.

At that point, I decided to pend getting my contact data over to Evolution and move on to something else. Apparently, I lost my mind, because I decided to upgrade my system to KDE 3. (I should mention here that any bad things I say in this or future journal entries about stuff that happens is not criticism of the people who are helping me. It's pointing out that I do these silly things because I'm silly.) Greg Lincoln had sent me a link to the site where I could download the rpm's for KDE 3 stable for Red Hat 7.2. I went to that site and downloaded, as Greg suggested, every file I found there except the language support files. I don't need support for Croatian or Norwegian or any of the other languages, but I did grab everything else.

I stuck the downloaded files in the /home/thompson/kde3 directory. Once I had them all, I brought up a command prompt window, executed su to make myself super user, changed to the /home/thompson/kde3 directory, and used the command rpm -Uvh *.rpm to install KDE3. Being an optimist, I was at that point expecting the process to complete normally and give me KDE 3.0. Instead, I got a whole bunch of error messages about failed dependencies. Oh, well. Everything seemed to continue working normally, so I assumed that the rpm installer was smart enough to check for dependencies before doing anything to the existing installation. That seemed to be the case, and everything continued working normally.

So I continued playing around with various Linux stuff, planning to ask Greg later what if anything I should do about KDE 3. It was then that I decided I was going to use Linux to do this page for tomorrow (today). Planning to use Mozilla Composer, I fired up Mozilla. Big mistake. It appeared to start normally, although with the ugly old Netscape skin. I clicked on Task - Composer and Composer came up apparently normally. I called up this page, which is located on the Windows server, and it came up, apparently normally.

Then I got to thinking about version numbers. I'm running 0.9.9 on Windows and wasn't sure what I was running on Linux. So I made the big mistake of clicking Help -- About. That brought up a new Navigator window and locked Mozilla up tight. All of the Mozilla windows were still visible, but none of them responded to any commands, including my attempts to close them. I searched in vain for an equivalent to Windows' Task Manager -- End Task command. Mozilla was covering my desktop and wouldn't go away. I couldn't move, minimize, or close the Mozilla windows. What was worse was that if I started another program like Evolution or Solitaire, the resulting program window was underneath the frozen Mozilla windows. I could of course get a fresh desktop by clicking 2, 3, or 4 down on the task bar, but nothing I did would fix the frozen windows in my primary desktop.

Eventually, I rebooted the system. The Mozilla windows were still there, but I was able to close them. So I took the Gone With the Wind approach, and decided to think about that problem tomorrow. As I was using Evolution, I made the mistake of clicking on a link embedded in an email. Instead of firing up Konqueror, Mozilla came up. I'm not sure how or why Mozilla ended up associated with html files and I really wish I knew how to change the association back to Konqueror. Because each time I click on an embedded link, Mozilla comes up and freezes.

So I decided to upgrade Mozilla to the current version. I used Konqueror to go over to the Mozilla web site. I found the rpm for Mozilla 0.9.9, downloaded it and double clicked on it to bring up the GUI rpm installer. I told it to install the 0.9.9 version, but again I got a failed installation due to a bunch of dependencies. Obviously, I needed more than just the one rpm. There were a half dozen or more, but I foolishly assume that just the one 10 MB one would be sufficient. Obviously it wasn't.

There was also a tarball version that was a bit larger, but I didn't get it because I don't remember the procedure for extracting and installing from a tarball. I seem to remember from the hazy distant past that I'd need to download the tarball, run tar -xvf to unzip the files, do a chmod, and then execute an installer executable. Or something like that. But vague recollections from years ago aren't good enough. Come to think of it, it may even have been a .gz file rather than a tarball.

So I went back to download the rest of the Mozilla rpm's. I got all of them downloaded, fired up a command prompt, became superuser, changed into the download directory, and typed rpm -Uhv *.rpm. This time I got only one failed dependency: "mozilla = 0.9.2.1 is needed by galeon-0.11.3-2". So again there's no joy. I can see that failed dependencies are going to be very aggravating.

When I went to bed last night, my primary desktop was still cluttered with Mozilla windows-that-will-not-die. This morning, they're all gone. Very strange. At any rate, that's why I'm typing this in Mozilla 0.9.9 Composer on my Windows 2000 system.

---

13:00 - more stuff going on, including several helpful emails, which are over on the Linux Chronicles page (yes, I've decided to start logging what I'm doing with Linux).

9:50 - Barbara said that the words I was writing about my transition to Linux didn't tell the full story, so she took this picture.


Actually, I've had that for years. I haven't until now worn it publicly for two reasons: first, I don't speak Japanese. Well, I know a few phrases from karate training many years ago, and I've picked up a few more, mostly rude, in the years since, but I certainly don't read Japanese (assuming that's really Japanese--the package says it was made in Taiwan). For all I know, those pictograms say "The guy wearing this is an idiot" or "Smoke Camels". Come to think of it, the latter is more likely, because it was Suzy Tucker, the wife of my friend Steve Tucker who works at RJ Reynolds, who gave it to me.

The second reason is much more important. I'm wearing this as a joke, but what it symbolizes is no laughing matter. Many brave men on both sides died during the kamikaze attacks on the US Pacific Fleet during the late stages of WWII. Although modern historians tend to write off those attacks as an ineffective and ultimately futile gesture, reality was different. I've known officers and men who were on those warships in those days, and from what they've told me the attacks were anything but ineffective or futile.

US propaganda had it that the kamizaze attacks were the last desperate attempt by Japan to stave off defeat. The truth is that the kamikaze attacks hammered our fleet badly, and were beginning to achieve their intended goal. Had they continued, had it not been for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, kamikaze attacks might well have driven the US Pacific Fleet away from the Japanese homeland. If you doubt that, just consider what damage a swarm of hundreds of Exocets with human pilots might do against even our current fleet. These were incredibly brave men, and I am not mocking them.


Frances, Barbara's sister, is getting married tomorrow. We have the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner tonight. I tried to convince Barbara that Malcolm would be an excellent ring bearer, but she was not amused. At least I don't have to wear a suit tonight. We'll do the walk-through of the whole thing and then go have dinner. I'll come home alone. Barbara is staying over at her sister's house tonight.


As this article in The Inquirer makes clear, Dell now officially admits that they are producing non-standard systems. Although Dell says that this is "well known throughout the industry" it certainly wasn't known to me, to Jerry Pournelle, or to any of the several PC experts I spoke with. Although Dell's response dances around the problem, they do admit tacitly that using an industry-standard power supply with a Dell motherboard (or vice versa) will destroy the system. Their answer is that you should buy your upgrade and replacement parts from Dell. That's unacceptable. We recommend buying your systems from someone other than Dell.


Just as I got Mozilla 0.9.9 installed and running on my Linux box yesterday, I found that Mozilla had posted the first Release Candidate for Mozilla 1.0. I downloaded and installed that on my den system (Windows 2000), where it appears to work fine.

I'm using Linux full-time now, so it's about time to move my Linux box over from the secondary keyboard and monitor to the primary. I miss my 19" monitor and Microsoft Optical mouse, and the sooner I get my Linux box using them the better.

12:15 - Busy weekend. Yesterday afternoon we drove down to the Baptist Hospital Chapel, where Barbara's sister is getting married today. Barbara had to put up signs to lead people from the parking deck to the chapel. Then they did the rehearsal stuff. I'm not in the wedding party, so I just sat out in the truck and read. After the rehearsal, we drove over to Mayberry's for the rehearsal dinner. A friend of Barbara's family, Pam Buie, who organized our wedding, is also doing Frances'. Pam's husband Drew, who used to be a wide receiver for the Oakland Raiders, was also there, as were all of Barbara's many aunts and uncles. After I'd eaten, I ducked out and headed home to make sure Mom and the dogs were okay.

This afternoon, I head back down to the Baptist Hospital Chapel for the wedding, followed by the reception. I'll shoot some pictures with the digital camera for Barbara to post on her page and then head back home to take care of dinner for Mom and the dogs. Barbara won't be back until late this evening.

I haven't had much time the last couple days to work with Linux, but I did run into some frustrations getting TrueType fonts to work with Red Hat 7.2. More details over on the Linux Chronicles page.

9:25 - Barbara's sister is officially married, and we're all exhausted. Details are over on Barbara's page. Now we have to clean house and do laundry, and then I'm going to relax for a while.