[LINK] Moved to Linux

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Linkers,

The combination of a dead PC and the painfulness of trying to get MS to 
okay moving the Windows license to a new machine has beaten me, so this 
is written from a new machine running Linspire.

So far, I can't call it painless, but it's been nearly-good-enough. The 
worst parts involved trying to move "must have" files from the old hard 
drive to the new machine, and getting the printer working (a 
non-supported printer).

The standard Linux advice is that you don't run the main user as Root - 
good security and administration advice, and in Linspire it's enforced 
by the install. The login account you start with is not the root user - 
you have to separately enable Root in the user administrator even to 
gain access to the root account.

However, this has several flow-on effects that the Linspire people don't 
seem to have thought of.

For example, moving my Thunderbird mail profiles from the old hard drive 
meant I had to find out where the copies went, and putting the copies in 
the right directory. This directory is only accessible as root, which 
means you have to enable the root account, change to the root account, 
and put the files in the right place; then you have to log out, log in 
as the user, and open Thunderbird to see if it can see the accounts.  
Moreover, because there are at least three directories called 
Thunderbird-mail-profile (one in user, one in root, and one which 
doesn't seem to relate to anything but is there anyway), this involves a 
lot of shuffling between directories.

More confusing - when I get the profiles in the right place, the folders 
would open in Thunderbird but not the old messages. After some hours, I 
finally realised: since the directories were copied in the root account, 
the user account (and therefore Thunderbird in the user account) didn't 
have read privilege. This is probably transparent to an experienced 
admin; to me, it was mystifying and frustrating. As I saw on the various 
use forums, this mystifies and frustrates lots of people, and I suspect 
because systems are built by admins, they don't think of explicitly 
telling users "you have to grant read-write to the users after you copy 
the profiles" (this was not mentioned on any forum post I read giving 
'how to migrate Thunderbird' instructions.

With that beaten, we turn to the question of printing. The HP2600n has 
no Linux drivers, so there was an awful lot of fiddling. Again, the 
attitudes of experts leaves a lot to be desired: since there's no "real" 
drivers, you can use 'this' driver set (download, compile, and install 
from horrible instructions) or do without.

Got it beaten by using instructions written for people wanting to print 
from Apple to 'difficult' printers. The other still-viable (but old) 
Windows machine is running Ghostscript as the 'pretend' printer between 
the Linspire box and the printer. Works perfectly - but far to difficult 
to discover.

Apart from that, the upsides to Linspire so far:

1) Install was fast. A dream: this is how installation should be. 
Nothing went wrong, no during-install reboots, just brilliant.
2) Networking required no effort whatever beyond plugging in the cable.
3) Everything else works as it should, with no more challenge than 
double-clicking.

The experience will be interesting ...

RC