Foreign Perspectives

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Or rather not.

The basic system is working very well on the computer but I’ve two problems that are stopping me from abandoning Vista at the moment.

The first is the wifi card. I’ve spent ages trying out the various “solutions” that I can find and, so far, none of them work. My guess is that I’ll have to wait for the new version of Ubuntu to sort these (it’s due out on the 24th of April).

 The second is getting stuff out of Outlook. It looks like the various versions of Outlook have managed to corrupt the data over the years so at the moment I’m having trouble getting that out via Thunderbird although I’m hopeful that I’ll get that operational in due course. Having over 10 years worth of e-mails takes a “little” time to move.

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One of the problems that you find when you’re blogging quite a lot is in keeping the quality of the posts up.

Many bloggers seem not to bother with quality and end up producing a steady stream of short posts that are barely in English and often total drivel. OK, I’ll admit that the “drivel” comment is a subjective one and some of those that write what I’d call drivel seem to have quite substantial readerships so clearly there’s a market for that out there.

What I try to do is to write about a number of separate themes that are intertwined here in the one blog. So you’ll see posts about finance, travel and daily happenings with very little linking them apart from them having been written about by me. That lets me write about three separate topics in a day and keeps things relatively fresh.

On a separate tack, I also have a separate blog over at The View from Arnold which has a similar mix of things but which treats them in a more indepth way and I’m currently limiting myself to five posts a week. What would appear here as two or perhaps three posts appears there as just one. I’ve also adopted the policy that every post will have a photo there which is turning out to be harder to keep up than expected: quite how the daily photo blogs manage it year after year I don’t know.

I’m thinking of doing a creative writing course next year so I’m also toying with adding a “writing” strand to the topics here but haven’t really got further than thinking that I’d like to do that so far.

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It took five and a half hours to download yesterday but finally I’ve got a DVD with Ubuntu (Linux) on it.

Setting up the computer to run both Vista and Ubuntu turned out to be surprisingly simple. All that I needed to do was to shrink the partition that contains Vista to make some room to install Ubuntu (you do that from disk management in Windows XP or Vista).

Next up was installing Ubuntu which was very simple and after the usual language and timezone selection, it installed and configured itself leaving me the option of loading up Vista or Ubuntu when I power up the machine.

The one problem so far is that I’ve not got the wifi card working but I’m installing the Ubuntu updates as I write this so perhaps it’ll be operational afterwards. As usual, there are a few drivers to be loaded so I can’t watch my videos ’til the updates are all installed for example.

Interestingly, you can use the Vista partition just as if it were part of Ubuntu. If I were doing the install again, I’d be inclined to just create a big enough partition for Ubuntu and hold the files in the Vista partition rather than try and make the Ubuntu partition as large as possible.

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