Tedious Work

I have started adding the final applications we have selected to the Ubuntu image machine. I will praise Automatix2 once again for its ease of use when doing this. I don’t have to add any suspicious repositories to access the packages we need, the official Ubuntu ones and Automatix include everything we need. By the end of today, the image machine will be almost completed. However, I want to look over the mp3 issue again and make sure it’s ok to include the codec for school computers. I will also make sure I haven’t missed anything in terms of useful or better applications.

Linux Alternatives to Windows Programs

Below is a chart of typical Windows programs installed on our school programs and their Linux alternatives. Many were available in Linux as well.

Quicktime with Ubuntu: Not a Great Pair

I played around some more with Wine. I was interested in seeing if I could get Quicktime player to work with Wine, and I was sure it could. I tried with the latest version, however it reported an error right at the end. I tried some other versions unsuccessfully, when I found a good guide from http://tsx.nl/index.php?p=qt4linux, actually found from Frank’s Corner at http://frankscorner.org/. It installed, but it wasn’t perfect. After the installation, the screen went black and portions returned after I moused over them. Quicktime seemed to work, however, the screen would become black. So even after everything, my attempts at implementing Quicktime were futile. We are better off using a similar Linux program instead.

WINE is Not an Emulator…but it is

The bulk of today’s work is finding the Windows programs people use and their Linux equivalents. Most of the programs in the list were easy to find, such as the Office suite. However, there were a few such as Geometer’s Sketchpad and Photoshop that are Windows only and some people may want the exact program. Therefore, we used Wine, and we downloaded a trial version of Geometer’s sketchpad. It worked wonderfully. Although the program doesn’t have much documentation on the Wine HQ site, there is some here http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=1549. Since we didn’t have Photoshop to play around with, I trusted the site on what it said. http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=17. It seems perhaps Photoshop 7 may work using Wine. Now, I will complete the list of programs and then work on the model computer.