Snoopin’ with the Snoop

Don’t know why my wireless connection died in Ubuntu this morning, but in trying to re-obtain it, I managed to corrupt my wired connection as well. Then I managed to change some setting on the router and kill the internet totally. Just to make sure it wasn’t a software issue, I reinstalled Windows.

All this started because I bought a hard drive with 100 more gigs than the original that came with my laptop back in spring 2005. With Windows installed and the router problem solved, I decided to attempt a dual-boot environment. I should be more specific in that I decided to try a dual-boot setup before I reinstalled Windows, and in that mindset, partitioned 20 gigs for Windows and left 140 undone. Not many users have that liberty, but by doing so, setting up the dual-boot with the Ubuntu LiveCD was absolutely painless. I left alone the 20gb Windows partition and installed Ubuntu on the 140g as if it were a harddisk in entirety and restarted. GRUB instantly gave me the option of booting Windows upon restart, which is what I am writing out of now. I didn’t have to specify anywhere that I wanted a dual-boot environment; GRUB is adept.

VirtualBox is excellent for running windoze within Linux, if you don’t want to dual boot, but The Master Genealogist, Still Life 2 (and Post Mortem and Still Life), and Digimarc are windoze only, so I decided to go for dual boot instead. Hopefully I am finished reinstalling OSs; it’s rather painful. “Painless” refers only to the dual-boot attempt, as I thought it would entail re-installing another three times! (Ubuntu is too easy to reinstall and I find myself fiddling with it a lot, and then reinstalling, because I have no idea what I did.)

(This post references another post of mine: Taking Off With Linux.)

Three cheers, or more, to HP and the Pavilion dv4000. Back when I bought the laptop in 2005, I was obsessed with Linux, but not to the point of installing it. Three years later, I have finally gotten rid of Windows as a host system, and am running Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) on my Pavilion laptop with the GNOME desktop environment. I have not yet missed anything from Windows. Well, since I found VirtualBox that is. I was pleased with Unbuntu/Gnome except that my genealogy program is only for Windows (TMG). So I tried setting it up in WineHQ and failed miserably, though there are users who have managed to make it work. I kept getting a VisualFoxPro9 error when it tried to launch my project after loading the program. I fretted over HAVING to have windows only to run my program, and I did not want a dual-boot system.

Then I found VirtualBox. VirtualBox is not an emulator; I actually installed Windows with my CD and went through the entire process required as if installing it as a host system. I had a bit of difficulty figuring out the Guest Additions inside VirtualBox in order to get the mouse, etc. to work, but it’s been breezy since. You can install any OS in VB (I assume), and following a tutorial I found on the net has provided me with an awesome way to have a portable media editing environment as opposed to installing everything on my hard drive (which by today’s standards is a small 55 GB). I haven’t yet figured out how to access my printer wirelessly in the XP Guest, though I can surf the internet just fine.

Truth be told, I like the Fluxbox Windows Manager better than the Gnome Desktop Environment (what’s the difference?), with the exception that I haven’t figured out how to access the wireless network in Fluxbox. (My brain has turned to mush being pampered by desktop environments like Windows (and Gnome) since Windows98. I never liked Windows95 and preferred DOS. Further, I hated Windows 3.1 for Workgroups and logged in as little as possible. 98 I liked though and drifted away from DOS at that point.) On the other hand, I can’t play Secret Maryo Chronicles in Gnome, though it works perfectly in Fluxbox.

I installed Opera instead of Firefox on the XP guest, just because I prefer Opera, though I choose to use Firefox3 regularly. I prefer Opera because of their trashcan (allowing one to bring back to life tabs accidentally or carelessly closed). Perhaps a Firefox3 user has developed an extension or add-on to duplicate this luxury, but I have not found one or one to my liking. [Update 16 March 2009: By accident, I found that Ctrl+Shift+T opens the last closed tab. But I have not yet found out how to open the 5th previously closed tab without opening all of the previous. Opera offers a dropdown list of closed tabs.]

Firefox3 is my browser of choice because of Zotero:

Harnessing the Zotero extension for genealogical use is the next challenge. I played around with it awhile back, back when I was in Vegas and wasn’t really focused on applying any free time to genealogical research and organizing my life. I didn’t get it much then, but I also wasn’t looking for organization, which it seems to provide. My only hesitance is that if I depend on it and my collections somehow get corrupted or mixed up, where will I be? I also need to study how and if (which) files are saved on my hard drive.

I’ve been looking for a manager for regular text, doc, pdf, &c files for quite a while. Plenty exist as music and photo applications, but I’ve not yet uncovered one geared for non-media documents. It would most likely use a database structure and would look not unlike the applications that law offices, for example, use to manage their cases (like Amicus). My want stems from organizing my files and retreiving them: say that I am doing research on the town of Pontiac, NY, and in a history book on the geographic area, one paragraph of the chapter I’m reading mentions Anson Bassett, my ancestor who died there. Since the pages I’m printing (to a pdf file) deal with an area in Erie County New York, I’d like to save them into my Places folder. In Windows, I got started placing shortcuts in my specific Surname folders when this situation occurred (and vice versa). I’d be nicer to have a visual organization and the ability to tag files with description as is allowed in many photo/music applications. (I just tried a new search string: “document management” instead of “file management” and seem to be on the right path.)