Tuesday, November 13, 2007

It's Been Too Long

Okay, after six months I guess you could say this blog had been abandoned. I've come back to visit, though. Hopefully I'll make more of a habit of it than I have in the past.

My sister finally decided to give Linux a try during my visit with her. She already uses cross-platform, open source applications for everyday use like Thunderbird, Firefox, and OpenOffice, so I though Linux would be a good fit. I installed Ubuntu, and made some recommendations for applications, although I did tell her there were usually many good alternatives for each task.

She likes Evolution for it's calendar, but when she tried the Evolution-RSS plugin it wouldn't work properly. It will download the feeds when first started up, but never updates them again. I've tried it on my system and the same thing happens, whether I use the plugin from the repositories or compile from source. I've suggested alternatives like Liferea for a stand-alone reader, or switching to Kontact, but I'm never happy with suggestions that say "use something else" rather than fixing the issue.

The one thing that seems to be holding her back from diving completely into Linux is the lack of a good blogging tool. She is a compulsive blogger and In Windows she uses BlogDesk, and I'm unable to find anything in Linux with the same functionality. I've tried getting it to run using Wine, but haven't been able to. Dual booting isn't practical, as she would have to reboot many times a day just to use one program.

Since Linux doesn't have a comparable tool (that I'm aware of), a virtualized Windows environment that she can run BlogDesk in seems to be the best solution. I've played around with VirtualBox, and I'm impressed with how easy it is to install, configure, and get running. Tomorrow I'll post a tutorial on how to get Windows XP running under Ubuntu Linux using VirtualBox.

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