From: Chris Robinson 

I thought I'd keep this thread up-to-date so's people can have a rough idea
of what I've been doing in Linux and any huurdles I come across.  I've been
fairly busy this weekend (went paintballing on Saturday - ouch) and so I
haven't done loads of things.

1. Reinstall:
One of the first things I did was to reinstall RedHat.  I did this as up
until Friday, half my system was still taken up by Windows partitions.  I'd
backed these up to a network share and so I wiped my drives clean,
installed RedHat on my 8Gb drive (I let it manage this space itself rather
than defining my own partitions) and set my 40Gb to be my /home directory. 
This went fine without any problems.

2. Chat, E-Mail & News:
I used Gaim to replace ICQ and MSN Messenger which it does well.  It
imports my MSN buddy list fine but I had to add all my ICQ contacts
manually (a bit anoying).  This said, another client for ICQ only called
Licq (I think) did import my contact list fine - I just like having one app
to do both (like Trillian does).

I set up my mail using Ximian Evolution which is an MS Outlook clone and a
very good one at that - it's really easy to use and simple to set up.  The
intelligent mail import wizard didn't really do much so I had to import my
mail from Eudora one mailbox at a time which was slightly annoying - this
said I didn't think I'd be able to import it at all.

I decided to use a program called Pan for news reading - I tested this out
last night and I like it a lot.  It reminds me a bit of the Netscape
Newsreader in layout only a lot nicer.

3. Media playing:
I think this is the area that's really going to annoy me.  I downloaded and
installed a player called Xine last night.  It looks good and has an
impressive amount of features.  It plays DVD's, VCD's, MPEGS, RealMedia,
Windows Media and Win32 Codecs - sounds impressive.  The install went
without any hitches and so I thought I'd try playing an MPEG.  It supports
drag and drop (thank god) and it appeared to play well, that is until I
full screened it - then it was unwatchably jerky.  I don't know if this is
something I've got wrongly configured or not but the performance really did
suck.  I know my PC's not state of the art but I think a PII 350 (running
at 392) and 512Mb RAM should be sufficient for playing MPEGS - maybe I need
to update my grpahics drivers or something? - I'll play more tonight.

4. Annoyances:
I'll post some of these as seperate questions I need answers to but they're here too:

At the moment it's the media playing that's annoying but I'm sure I'll sort
it soon.  The other thing that really sucks is that XMMS (the Winamp clone)
and XINE (the video file player) don't support playing files from SMB (i.e
Windows network share) locations.  This means that I have to copy across
any MP3's or videos we have on our LAN to my PC before I can listen to or
watch any of them - that suck IMO and I hope there's some way aound this.
Alomost every single MP3/ Video player I've tried in Windows supports
palying files from network locations - as should these.

The other thing is that my Palm doesn't sync.  I've used it on another PC
running Linux fine but on my home one it doesn't play well - no matter
which serial port it's in.

The final thing is the lack of a slide show viewer.  One of the feature I
used a lot in XP was the ability to select "view as slide show"
for a directory of pictures - I haven't found a way to do this yet in
RedHat. Double clicking every image and then closing it really isn't an
option for a directory with 100+ pictures in it.

Chris.

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