A slightly geeky day at work

I had a few things to tidy up this morning, and a big meeting for cunning plan implementation. After lunch I decided to boot back into linux and finally finish the configuration. I'm using Kubuntu 9.10 mainly as I like the prettiness of the KDE desktop. The utilitarian approach of Gnome is good, but I like pretty - I'm a Mac boy damnit.

I'd already set up email, sadly Evolution doesn't have a Exchange 2007 plugin yet. I'm thinking of switching to the KDE mail suite, but it's never really rocked my world, so will continue with Evolution (mail) and Outlook Web Access for calendaring etc. I guess I could look at synching my outlook calendar with gmail which would do what I want better. Hmmm. No hurry as it does synch nicely with the iphone so I'm still getting reminders when I need them.

Got a bit sick of Kopete which is the default KDE instant messenger, so I've installed Pidgin since that's what I was using on the Windows side of the box. I've also edited the display settings so it's crystal clear (better than windows, which is odd), although it continues to want to display on the laptop and the external monitor - guess that's something to look at in the new year.

Using Firefox for the browser, KDE's default one is good, but has a few issues with websites that don't follow HTML coding properly.

The big win? Plugging in my Mac formatted ipod, the system recognising it, and Amarok (the KDE default media player) picking it up and playing tracks off it - no problems at all. The Pidgin plugins for 'now playing' are very simple to plug in, and there's a Last.FM plugin built in by default.

I haven't finished configuring my drive mappings, currently I can see the SMB shares, but only as read-only, and I can't be bothered doing much about that today. I'm sure I fixed that on another box, so will see if I made any useful notes concerning it.

Generally, I'm liking it. It's certainly a lot less clunky than it used to be - not nearly as smooth as MacOS, but certainly more is built-in and just works out of the box than Windows. I think I'll continue to use it more in the new year, if only as it reads the ipod and I can play music and tell people what I'm listening to. Yes, I am that shallow.
Oh and the Skype linux version, technically beta, works well. No problems there either.

I also tidied my desk, and starting reading about Prince2, but then decided fiddling with my linux box was more interesting.

Love, B