Hardy Heron: Day 1

Well, I’m back in ubuntu world for today.  It’s been quite the long way around back.  After finishing up my tshirts using Vista and photoshop, I had to prepare for a vacation to Ireland and England (went very well, thanks).  Over the weeks up until the vacation, we were scrambling to plan things and just keep our daily life in order.  It was quite the struggle…so much so that I barely touched my ubuntu.  You see, my wife started a site to help her study for the GRE, but it has broadened in scope to include a forum that we spend most of our time in.  Guess who’s the webmaster?

Anyway, it’s about a week and a half since we’ve returned from our vacation and I’m back in Ubuntu land running Hardy Heron on my XPS m1330.  The good news (of stuff I tried):

1.  Compiz-fusion works!  Finally!

2.  X-Sane works!

3.  cups-pdf works!

4.  kdeprint works!

5.  awn works (cause compiz is working)

and that’s about all I’ve tried thus far.  Now here’s what doesn’t work:

1.  cups-pdf is wonky with scan area.  Had to set some funky offsets to get it right.  Also no multipage PDF creation from what I can tell.

2.  rdp busted

3.  f-spot couldn’t import photos from network share (neither could picasa running in wine).

Anyway, enough head scratching for the night…I’m switching to Vista to sort through my UK photos and upload them to flickr.  We’ll give Ubuntu another try this weekend.

rdesktop update

The last bit to get me over to Ubuntu full time has been getting rdesktop working with my headless vista server which I have no intention of turning into an ubuntu machine in the near future for the simple reason that it runs mozy in order to back up all of the stuff on my NAS RAID array. I may eventually figure out a way around that, but for the moment, my kludged solution works.

I’ve been having trouble getting the terminal services client that comes with ubuntu to recognize my vista machine’s name and realized that it like IP addresses. Since those change now and again when my vista box reboots, I figure I’d better give that thing a static IP so as I’ll be able to get back into it when I do go Ubuntu full time on the m1330.

Remote Desktop – Ubuntu

The fact of the matter is that my server that does all of my backup and that sort of goodness runs on Vista. It also houses my budget spreadsheet so I need to get to it on a regular basis. I tried gnome-rdp but it keeps telling me that it’s unable to find my desktop. I’ve been looking around and think I need to try something called rdesktop (according to this anyway).

I suppose that’s the fun part about Linux. I mean RDP has been around for ages in the Microsoft world (they called it Terminal Server before) and it’s pretty much standardized there. You could use VNC or other protocols to get into another PC remotely, but it’s usually easier to just use Windows’ built in RDC app. After using Parallels on Hongyun’s Macbook and enjoyed the coherence mode that makes Windows apps look like they are native mac apps. I’m hoping I can find something similar to this for Ubuntu.