Foreign Perspectives

Moving to Linux would be very easy were it not for the hassles of getting your emails transferred over. However, at least it’s not the showstopper that it was just a few years ago.

Your first issue is finding your .PST files which you can do by clicking on properties. To copy those over, go out of Outlook and copy them onto a USB stick. Likewise for contacts, calendars, etc. if you want those too though I’ve never used them so won’t be talking about them here. Evolution has a PST import limit of around 500MB so if your PST file(s) are bigger than that you’ll need to create some more and move your email into them until you’ve the PST files below the limit. At this point, it’s best to disable Outlook which you can so simply by changing the POP server that it uses to pick up your email; note down the settings as you’ll need those to set up Evolution.

Next you will need to install Evolution if you’ve not done so already and also ReadPST.

Evolution can take quite a while to import PST files (hours in my case) so you’ll need some patience for this step. Once that’s done you’ll discover one limitation of its import facility: it doesn’t import email in top level folders. Thus you’ll find that various folders which it has created are empty. This is where ReadPST comes in because it will read those PST files and separate them out into the various folders with mbox files in each of them. For the folders which Evolution has left empty, you need to import the contents from the appropriate spot in the folder hierarchy which ReadPST has created for you.

Finally, there’s the business of getting new mail  into Evolution. Go into Edit, Preferences and create the email accounts that you had in Outlook. As always, the settings here aren’t quite the same as those in Outlook (why that’s so is a mystery as the mail servers obviously work with all mail clients). In my case, I found that 1and1 needed a bit of tweaking to get outgoing mail to work, the settings being server: auth.1and1.co.uk (as per Outlook), server requires authentication, no encryption, authentication type: login. Once you’ve those set up, it’s best to send yourself a message to check that it’s all working.

What about email rules? I took the chance to do a little rationalisation of my email folder structure so didn’t bother trying to import those but that seems the best approach anyway as Evolution doesn’t seem to have nearly so much complexity as Outlook did. I say complexity rather than flexibility as there are just so many options in there that if you’re not careful email can seem to go into random folders sometimes.

And that’s it. Sadly, importing the messages isn’t as automated as it could be and, in my case, took quite a while but then that’s down to me having email back to 1996 and a far too complicated folder structure.

Popularity: 1% [?]

For me Vista was the final straw that decided me upon dumping Windows at the earliest opportunity. Never before had I seen such a poorly tested system.

That was a couple of years ago but moving out of Windows wasn’t possible for me then as I’d heaps of mail in Outlook which I wanted to take with me. Now it’s different though as the mail import facilities available in the Ubuntu mail programs have come on considerably so at the moment I’m in the process of cutting down the size of the PST below the 1GB import limit which seems the final barrier. Still, it’s on the home run so later today I should have everything moved into Ubuntu.

Aside from the email the move has been incredibly easy to do. Backing up everything in Vista and restoring it all in Ubuntu worked just fine. The only preparation required for that was making sure not to use the Office 2007 file formats though even that’s not really a requirement these days as OpenOffice can read those just fine.

What’s the benefit of the move though? Well, the Vista computer was quite simply becoming unuseably slow thanks to all the junk that’s associated with Vista. One notable improvement that I did make on Vista was disabling the “indexing” facility. That’s there simply to speed up searching for text within the files on your computer. Sounds like a useful facility, doesn’t it? How many times have you ever used it? For me, it’s at best once every couple of years yet enabling indexing has a major impact on the day to day speed of your computer (it’s the reason why your disk is in almost constant use even when you’re not doing anything). Even disabling it takes hours though as it needs to switch off indexing on every file on your computer which probably means hundreds of thousands of files these days for almost everyone.

The other major benefit is that Ubuntu is smaller. A lot smaller. It runs just fine on the netbook computer with 512MB which isn’t an option for Vista. That smaller size means that it runs a whole lot faster. Running SkyPE works great on the Acer 751 in Ubuntu; the same computer can’t deal with video when running Vista. It takes a lot less discspace too. The basic Windows 7 installation needs about 25GB, the basic Ubuntu installation needs less than 10GB. That’s not comparing like with like either as the Ubuntu install includes a fully working Office installation.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I’ve been weaning everyone off Windows over the past year so we’re getting into the first multi-computer upgrade of Ubuntu.

One of the problems seems to be that an Ubuntu upgrade seems to take forever if you’ve been installing bits and pieces of software over the course of the year. Of course, that’s pretty much the situation everyone is in thus it seems to be over 10 hours for everyone (my Aspire One weighed in at 15 hours).

On the other hand, a new install of 9.10 on another Aspire One took under 30 minutes although there’s another hour to download prior to the install.

Granted, there’s more software to download in an upgrade and indeed that “30 minute” install will likely end up at two or three hours counting downloading time. That’s still a long, long way short of the 10-15 hour times for upgrades though.

I’m going to see if I can speed things up somewhat for the next upgrade by copying the downloaded packages from /var/cache/apt/archives. There’s the “proper” way to do this but it sounds simpler to just copy all the .deb files and plonk them on with dpkg. Doing that should mean that I can get away with a backup, clean install and package install for the last couple of machines with the only thing remaining being setting up the Internet and email on them.

Popularity: 1% [?]