UBUNTU Seems To Be Running Well
May 28th, 2007 by Don Ray
UBUNTU seems to be running well. At the present, I can’t think of anything that I could do with Windows XP that I can´t do on UBUNTU. Of course many things are done differently and those things are taking me time to learn. What is amazing is how much capability I have from a free system downloaded from the Internet.
The word processors that are available seem to do everything I want them to do. I have regained a spell checker in Spanish, which I had lost because one of Window´s upgrades had disabled the thesaurus and Spanish spell checker. The keyboard works a little differently in the international setting and I am still learning how to get some of the punctuation to work correctly.
My Canon Printer was recognized and works the same as before. I haven’t connected my scanner, but expect it to be found as well. I thought I had a problem getting my photos from my camera into the Linux system, but that must have been a user error because it is working now.
The management of my file folders is different and that slows me down, but with time that will no longer be a problem.
I had a language translator program on the Window´s PC that I don´t have on the Linux PC, but that can be solved with web based translators. The only problem with them is that they are´t available if the Internet is down from my end.
The one problem I would like to solve is how to move my email history and calendar from Outlook on the Windows PC to either Thunderbird or Evolution on the UBUNTU PC. I have moved my contact list so all that I am missing on the Linux box is my saved emails.
The other thing I miss that I had on my XP system is an email spam filter. On XP I had LASHBACK with Outlook and it put all detected spam into a Spam folder. Then once a day I could go through that folder and verify that no valid emails got caught by mistake. Now normal emails and spam email are all merged together with Evolution so that takes a little more time and is a little less convenient, but I am getting used to it.
Since most of the things I need a PC for is photos, browsing the Internet and word processing, my old PC (with UBUNTU Linux) is running about as fast as my newer PC running Windows XP. I am short a little memory on the Linux PC, so I think I will pick up another meg when I get to the US. That may help the speed.
See there is always something to do when you move to Panama even if it is just moving from one PC operating system to another. And you thought I couldn’t make this post Panama related. 
Don Ray,
Evolution can learn what is junk and what is not. I use the bogofilter plugin (Edit/Plugins). You will need to do a “sudo apt-get install bogofilter” before enabling the plugin.
I also have a spam filter (Edit/Message Filters) that looks for the header entry “X-Spam-Flag” with a value of “YES” to segregate spam from real mail. There will be some mail incorrectly flagged, so you’ll have to check the folder where you put your SPAM. Keep this as your last filter so trusted mail is less likely to get placed in the folder where you put SPAM.
Don,
Found this tutorial, hope it helps you.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/moving-outlook-email-data-to-linux-evolution-mail-client.html
Hi Tuxi - Thanks for the tip. I will see if i am smart enough to add that function.
Don,
When you get time check out a site called Lifehacker. Neat site. I did a search for Ubuntu for you. Lots of neat info on this site.
http://lifehacker.com/search/ubuntu/all/
Don,
Found this on moving files frow windows to ubuntu.
http://codeidol.com/unix/ubuntu/Getting-Started/Move-Your-Windows-Data-to-Ubuntu/
Thanks Kevin. Now I just need to get more time.