One of the things that's been bugging me a little since moving to Ubuntu is which email client to use. On Windows my mail client was TheBat! from Ritlabs, it serves me very well and everything is set up just as I want it, so to move from was a wrench. It struck me on Tuesday that I could try and use Wine to run TheBat! (TB). So I installed Wine using:

sudo apt-get install wine

Before setting up TB under Wine I did a Backup from TB under Windows. Then using Wine File browser I launched TB from one of my NTFS partitions. On running TB I restored the backup I'd just made under windows, again directly from an NTFS partition. This process was super quick, normally restoring a backup under Windows takes a few minutes, this was done in under a minute, fantastic for a 450Mb file! TB then ran with my mail archive and settings restored perfectly. However all of the icons on the toolbars and the tree window where black. After a bit of rooting around on Wine's website I found that an already reported bug was causing the problem. The solution was to update from .33 to .36 which I did using the instructions I found here, which solved the problem instantly.

So now I'm basically running TheBat! with all my mail under Ubuntu. Kudos to the Wine team, for a first time user it was a great experience.

Neat tip from Johnny

Here's a cool tip from Johnny Chadda who solves a minor irritation with Ubuntu. At home I'm connecting to a wireless network using WPA, however each time after login a prompt appears for the root password to connect to the network. Johnny's tip solves the problem neatly, here's the link.

SoundConvertor & Realplayer

Time for a few more reflections on life with Ubuntu so far.

Realplayer - bef0re my re-installation a few days ago Realplayer was working fine on the BBC's website. Now after my reinstall of Ubuntu, despite using Automatix to install realplayer I get the following error:I'm sure that it's surmountable and I will try the troubleshooting tips on help.ubuntu.com, however I would rather that it 'just worked' like it did on the previous occasion. I've uninstall and reinstalled it a few times to no effect.


Ogg Vorbis - I've been using SoundConverter to do convert some audio files from mp3 to ogg. I really like SoundConverter and it seems to do a great job of converting the files. After a but of reflection and testing I tried various different bitrates for the conversion and finally settled on the Low setting (around 96kbps). The mp3's are mainly lectures and so there is very little discernable difference in the audio quality from a bitrate of 320 to 96! However the difference in file size is considerable, hence why I've opted for the smaller size.

More updates tomorrow...

Sessions Redux

Installing the newly renamed Pidgin fired my interest again regarding my sessions issue from day 6. A bit of rooting around on Ubuntu forums lead to me finding that the solution to the problem was to issue the following code:

sudo chown  ~/.config/autostart

which seems to have solved the problem, however it seems that this is only a workaround since there is still an outstanding Launchpad bug. Anyway the issue is solved for the moment.

In the interregnum since my last posting I've been playing around with SoundConverter which I've used to convert some of my mp3's to Ogg Vorbis. SoundConverter will basically read pretty much any format of audio file and convert to FLAC, mp3, wav and Ogg. It works very well, however it seems to be much slower than ripping a CD in the first place. Why this would be I don't know, anyway a very useful tool!