dstiles - 10:51 pm on Mar 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

A point about Samba - or at least, the smb4k app I'm using:

When I set up Clam for the first time it not only scanned the linux disk but also every disk on the other networked machines as well. Useful if that's how you want it but a bit of a nuisance if the other machines AV their own disks. Easy enough to block through the clam config script, of course.

I agree it could be made more obvious that something like smb4k is required on a Windows network. It knows there are Windows machines, why not mention it?

All the machines I need to access remotely are Windows (2000 intranet, 2003 internet), all with Terminal Services (I've never liked VNC on Windows: it's slow and I don't trust its integrity - in my view too many people know how to exploit it and there seem to be a lot of hack attempts). I originally used Terminal Server Client to access the remotes but after some problems with clipboard failing intermittently I followed a tip from a forum and now use Gnome-RDP. This seems to work fine.

My experience of playing audio CDs on the machine whilst I'm working is a bit frustrating. First, several of the apps I've tried seem to want to load track info from web sites, which a) I don't want and b) they get wrong, telling me that the Ring Cycle, for example, was composed by someone completely different and offering no track info at all (early CDs but no reason for not getting it right). They also assume I want to upload info about my CDs to the web site.

The other problem is that there are frequent stutters in the tracks and occasionally a CD will stop, often at the end of a track, and be a devil to re-start. When checked, System Monitor says there is no reason for this: plenty of spare memory and plenty of CPU cycles.

Tried so far: Audio CD Extractor (aka Sound Juicer), my current one; Helix, which seems to give no track info at all; Kaffeine (which I can't make work); Rythmbox (my previous one which stopped more often than SJ); VLC (which I can't get working).

On an earlier point, I don't need contact information but I do use email a lot. Since I'm familiar with Thunderbird on Windows, that's what I use on ubuntu. It works, no problems.

KAlarm works fine for the very few appointments I have (dentist, when to uploading google base, when to renew SSL certs, all long-term stuff).

Firefox with NoScript and several other add-ons for web browsing and site dev: currently have eight windows open with from four to ten tabs open in each. Again, no problem.

I'm a long time Windows user, back to V3 and MSDos almost from day 1 before that (with a brief excursion into Red Hat in early internet days), so like mack I'm channelled into the Windows mentality (I dislike most MS stuff but I was customer driven).

I require few apps but the ones I do need I use either intensively or infrequently: there is little middle ground. The advantage of ubuntu to me is a cleaner, faster environment with tools that I'm familiar with, and in two years I've required no "specialist" linux-only type of apps.

Except, like mack, I miss a few things on Windows, which I'm still forced to use as a secondary desktop machine. I never play games but I'm heavily into genealogy, which ubuntu seems poor at; otherwise I use it as a monitor / controller for my online servers. I also use it for the small amount of graphics I do, since I'm familiar with Corel Paint. Windows is also necessary for testing web sites under the excruciating MSIE.