Day 1

My current setup consists of Windows XP Pro running a trial version of Office 2007 pro; the trial period has ended and I am loath to part with my well earned cash to allow me to manage emails, contacts and do my accounts (excel).

So today I have decided to give Linux "another" go as a Desktop O/S Alternative.

In my previous attempts (SUSE, FEDORA, RED HAT); I have failed miserably to last any decent amout of time in using Linux as my main operating system. The primary reasons being that although Linux is touted as being installable on almost any machine I have constantly found that it runs like a slug on anything that isnt a decent spec pc.

My current pc spec is :-
Intel Quad Core CPU, 2gig DDR2 Ram, 160gig SATA 8mb Cache the rest is unimportant.

The other problem has been the open source office programs have not quite lived up to potential for me.

My main pc curretly does the following tasks:-

• Emails (Outlook)
• Wordprocessing (Word)
• Accounts (Excel)
• Invoicing (Excel with Visage expert PDF)
• Basic HTML (Dreamweaver CS3)
• Web browsing (IE & Opera)
• Photo Manipulation (paint.net)

Having looked at what is available with linux, I have decided on UBUNTU with Evolution, OpenOffice & Komposer.

My first task is my 1.5gig of emails, contacts & calendar; How am I going to import these into Evolution? My initial idea (that im going ahead with) is firstly BACKUP EVERYTHING then save my outlook data as a .pst file.

I am then going to setup a "free trial" of a hosted exchange account with some online provider. I will get my account running in Outlook and then import my .pst file back into Outlook and sync with the hosted exchange server. Im hoping evolution on Linux will sync with the exchange server and grab all my outlook data :) - I will then close the hosted exchange account as I dont need it.

This is problably and hopefully my only major task.

I have installed a 2nd Hard-Drive in my machine and used a utility (EX2IFS) to create and access an Ext2 partition. I am then backing up all my files to the Ext2 partition in order for me to access them when Ubuntu is running.

I have just downloaded Ubuntu .ISO and burned to disk and I am now ready to wipe the drive and install. I am currently bloggin from my XP machine and I am very much hoping my next blog post will be from UBUNTU :)

See you on the other side....