Read the Introduction

If I hadn't had a pretty good idea of what I was doing when I started this adventure, I'd have been lost in the GNU/Linux jungle and have been eaten by the cannibals native to those parts. It would have been an unpleasant and gory end to me and my expedition.

My choice of metaphor certainly points to the fact that only a seasoned adventurer would have come through the jungle to the promised-land unscathed. In my case I was slightly scathed -- especially by the talons of the Thunderbird and the electrical strikes of its Lightning bolts. I wasn't killed, but that was only because I'd fought with creature in the past, and I knew where to strike at its soft underbelly.

Those novice adventures would have been struck down by the wild Thunderbird of the Gnu/Linux jungle, never to recover. Had they survived the encounter, they'd have returned to their cities where tamer Thunderbirds are kept safely in captivity, behind reinforced Windows.
Even if they manage to avoid the mighty winged beast, and are met with clear, Lightning-free skies, these green jungle explorers will continuously hear the beat of the Samba drums, resonating through the air, vibrating the tendrils that network between the trees of the jungle, and just generally creating a powerful sense of unease.
Though some may not even notice the drumming, a great many would flee from the source of the noise, back-back-back to their safe buildings and Windows.

Turns out there is a beaten path through the jungle, and mostly the Samba dancing, drum-beating natives along that path are quite friendly and helpful. Woe betide you should you have intially entered the jungle, all Gutsy and rearing to go and later crossed over on to the beaten Hardy path, instead of leaving the jungle and getting on to the Hardy path from the point that it first enters the jungle.
Turns out the friendly Samboin natives only live a certain way along the path. The Samboin cannibal tribe live deeper in the jungle, just about where you'll end up when you Gutsily take the short-cut through the jungle to the Hardy path.

I had to battle those cannibals, but I came out of the alive, and the cannibals no longer found me appetising once I figured out how to manipulate their Samba dances.

Even without the cannibals, the Hardy pathway needs maintenance. Nothing serious -- but if the adventurer isn't cautious he or she is likely to trip and stumble over the potholes from time to time.

Ultimately, compared to the safety and familiarity of the civilised world, where glass has been invented, the Gnu/Linux jungle is a terrifying place. There are less scary places in the jungle. Clearings and friendly tribes. Places where you can safely wander and have a picnic, where no wild beasts or angry natives will harass you. They aren't particularly interesting places in the jungle, and you find you can't also do the things you'd like to do in those places.

Fortunately there are also quite a few seasoned adventurers wandering about in the darker corners of the jungle who are quite willing to help protect those new to the jungle from its dangers. They pass through the protected areas from time to time, and so the new guys can hook up with them. They'll show the new guys the vines, and how to swing gracefully from one branch to another. But the new guys still need to be willing to grab those vines, throw caution to the wind, and swing high in the air from tree to tree without a safety net.

Most people are too scared to swing high in the air with no safety net, but the jungle is of limited use at the moment if you aren't willing to try. Plus, what about the frigging cannibals?

Enough with the metaphors. I think you get the point. Migrating to Linux from windows for working environments isn't a trivial exercise, and it sure as hell didn't "just work" for me. However, since I have a fairly good idea of what I was doing, I could make it work. Switching isn't recommended unless you know (or one of those seasoned adventurers knows) how to fix up things when they don't go quite according to plan.

And now for the boring parts, where I actually explain what I did with the computer, and in some cases offer solutions to my problems. You can try the solutions if you are suffering from similar problems, but I don't promise they'll work for you.

If you aren't looking for technical solutions, but just want to read on, feel free. I'm afraid I haven't made much effort to be particularly witty in the sections that follow.

Email: Thunderbird
I had expected that transferring my email wouldn't cause any headaches. Thunderbird is cross-platform, so just transfer the user files from Windows' Documents and Settings to Linux's home folder, right? No problems, right?

Bah!

Copying all the user files from Windows to Linux actually works perfectly, as long as you aren't using any plugins. All the mail is imported correctly.

Assuming you are running a Debian-based system, the procedure would be:

1. Install Thunderbird, using whatever works best for you. This works for me: $ aptitude install thunderbird
2. Run Thunderbird. This creates the .mozilla-thunderbird directory in your home directory.
3. Cancel the new account setup dialogues, and close Thunderbird.
4. Copy all the files in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[random number].default\ to /home/[username]/.mozilla-thunderbird/[random number].default
5. Restart Thunderbird. All your mail and account settings should be there.

If you had installed plugins, particularly Lightning and Provider for Google Calendar, you'll be in for a serious skull-cracking migraine time.

What it came down to was that I was running Lightning 0.8 and Provider 0.4, and they required a particular library that is missing from the default installation of Ubuntu 8.04.
I fixed it by installing libstdc5, as per this conversation
$ sudo aptitude install libstdc5

It wasn't as easy as I've made it out to be. I trawled the internet for quite some time before I found that Google Groups discussion. I doubted the wisdom of continuing my transition to a more free and open working environment, and had to continue working in Windows for a while until I'd worked out the problems. I stuck to my resolve though.

Network file-sharing: Samba
My office environment requires that I share my projects over the LAN, and have at least one location where other users can copy files to my computer. I also need to be able to access everyone else's shared folders. The good thing was that accessing other people's stuff was easy, because everything is set up to allow guest access. Well done to the Samba project

I've got things in a dual-boot setup. This means that a lot of my documents are still on the Windows partition, with the disc in the NTFS format.

Ubuntu stubbornly refused to allow me to share anything on the NTFS format -- at least not via the Gnome desktop environment. Since I needed to get work done, and people needed access to certain of my files, I just copied them over to my home folder and shared them from there. This worked fine, since my user account was now the owner of the files.

This problem stemmed from me upgrading to 8.04, and not doing a fresh install. Because Gutsy used fstab to mount the windows drive automatically, it had set umask parameters that prevented others from accessing the files. If you install Hardy from scratch, you won't encounter this problem because hardy doesn't automatically mount the drives. The user mounts the drives, and so the user has permissions to let others access the partitions.

If you have upgraded, and are encountering this problem, the work around is to remove or comment out the relevant entries in fstab, like so:

First backup fstab
$ sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak

Then, using nano or your favourite text editor:
$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

Then, run around screaming.
$ screaming!!!!!

No. Skip the screaming. You've probably done it already anyway. Instead, rather add a hash (#) to the beginning of the offending line (or lines) in fstab.

For example, let's say the offending partition is /dev/sda2
It's line in fstab is something like this:

UUID=ABCD1234567890AB /media/windows  ntfs-3g    defaults,umask=002,gid=46 0       1

Pop one of these suckers '#' at the beginning, like so:
# UUID=ABCD1234567890AB /media/windows  ntfs-3g    defaults,umask=002,gid=46 0       1

Reboot!

Actually, rebooting isn't necessary. You can just unmount and remount the volume, but I'm not going into how to do that.

After that, the partition isn't automatically mounted -- you need to do it yourself via Gnome -- but at least sharing files works as expected. This is also the default behaviour of Hardy Heron.
If you want the volume to mount automatically, and to be able to share things as expected, this worked for me:

Edit the fstab line you previously turned into a comment so that it rather looks like this:
UUID=ABCD1234567890AB /media/windows ntfs-3g rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,allow_other 0 1

That'll make the volume mount when the computer starts up, and you'll be able to share folders with other network users as expected. Be warned though -- if you don't allow guest access to the files, you'll be in store for some painful times with smb.conf and smbpasswd. They won't be insurmountable, but they may not be filled with pleasantries.

A final note: when using Hardy, make sure that you install all of the Recommended updates -- not just the security updates. This is crucial if you want to be able to work on files over the network, without copying them to your local machine.
Gnome has recently changed their virtual file system, and not all applications had been ported to the new system when Hardy was released. I think this is the reason for the issues. It wasn't an optimal situation to be in. For example, I couldn't open documents with openoffice over the network. This made checking which document I wanted to work with a laborious process. In the end the best option was to copy the file across the network, open it locally, check the file was the one I wanted. Discover it wasn't. Rinse. Repeat.