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Hello Ros and others - <br><br>
Long story to make up for the possum stirring.<br><br>
One of my recent little home jobs has been to recover files from my
daughter's laptop - it dual booted Windows and Fedora linux, but the
Fedora side became mangled and would not load. It contained amongst other
things her BSc(Hons) thesis written with LaTeX, and although she had a
copy on the Mt Stromlo servers, she wanted the one on the lappy so she
could fix the punctuation and grammar. She wanted me to:<br>
1) recover the files on the linux side<br>
2) remove the Fedora installation and install Ubuntu<br><br>
Task 1 proved to be the trickier - the obvious approach was to run Ubuntu
live from a CD, then copy files to an external USB HDD, but this does not
work straight off - I got file access denied messages. A bit of Googling
found why - it seems the gid numbers in Ubuntu and Fedora are different
for ordinary users. I was not game to try 'chown' as a workaround in case
it mucked things up. Now I knew that Ubuntu/Kubuntu reads and writes to
NTFS partions quite happily, so I wondered if it would work the other way
- could Windows read Ext3 partions. More Googling quickly found two
solutions, and the one that worked best is Ext2IFS for Windows <br><br>
<a href="http://www.fs-driver.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.fs-driver.org/</a> <br><br>
After installation this searches your system and allows the user to
assign drive letters to Ext2 and Ext3 partitions. I tried it on the
sacrificial lappy here at work and it worked like a charm.<br><br>
At home I installed this driver on my daughter's lappy, got drive letters
etc., then found and copied the files off to a caddy. There were some
problems with file and folder names that contained illegal characters (as
far as Windows was concerned), but that was fixed with Ubuntu from a CD
and peace and calm returned to the Maunder household.<br><br>
Task 2 was quite interesting for me, because it made me come to grips
with Ubuntu, when previously I would give up if something did not work
immediately, and I was only considering getting it to work in our work
environment. Also, I had a look at what is needed to edit with LaTeX. See
<a href="http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html</a> I knew that this has been
around for many years in the unix and DEC VAX world, and it seems that
the Linux people prefer 'Kile' as the IDE (integrated development
environment).
<a href="http://kile.sourceforge.net/" eudora="autourl">
http://kile.sourceforge.net/</a> Some more Googling for a Windows LaTeX
IDE found 'WinShell'
<a href="http://www.winshell.de/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.winshell.de/</a> which has a similar look and feel to 'Kile'.
So, back to Ubuntu. <br><br>
Again playing with the aforementioned sacrificial laptop (so I could get
the installation right before doing the daughter's machine), Ubuntu went
on easily and then I had to find out how to install software, which means
getting the Synaptic to work, which means getting the network to work
etc. I found that network proxies are set in about 3 places, (system,
browser and Synaptic) and that the NDS gateway (I think that's what it
is) is not always picked up automatically. I found out what you have to
do to play MP3 files.<br><br>
The end result is that I would happily use Ubuntu on a home machine, as
it does everything I need to do and most of the things I'd like to do
(mostly music stuff). Maybe I'll try to get 'Half-Life' running under
'Wine', but that's what the Windows partition is for.<br><br>
rgds<br>
Jim (who hopes you don't mind a bit of off-topic ramble)<br><br>
<br>
At 06:04 PM 02/07/2008, you wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Hello all – hope your holidays
are fun<br>
<br>
Wow!! This is great – now I can have the best of all three worlds…<br>
<br>
This seems like a great way to introduce yourself to Ubuntu Linux
(although the learning curve is not that steep) without dedicating a
whole machine to it, or having to worry about partitions and dual
booting.<br>
<br>
<a href="http://lifehacker.com/358208/seamlessly-run-linux-apps-on-your-windows-desktop">
http://lifehacker.com/358208/seamlessly-run-linux-apps-on-your-windows-desktop</a>
<br>
...<br>
<b>Roslyn Meadows<br>
Head of ICT Implementation<br>
Head of Assessment and Reporting<br>
Bentleigh Secondary College </b></blockquote>
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-----------------------------------------------------------<br>
We have to use this Disclaimer<br><br>
Views, opinions, etc. expressed reflect those of the author and not<br>
Ruyton Girls' School <br>
-----------------------------------------------------------<br><br>
Jim Maunder<br>
Laptop and PC Support Technician<br>
Ruyton Girls School<br>
Melbourne, Australia<br>
ph 03 9290 9374<br><br>
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