Recently, I made the move from Microsoft Office Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. Yes, I know, webmail is cool and everything (I’m on Gmail and the webmail is awesome), but I’ve always preferred a desktop email client.

My problem is/was that I use both Windows and Linux and want my client to be updated with my latest mail on both operating systems (previously I had to be in Windows to use Outlook to get my mail, which is partly why I switched). Now an IMAP server would be a great way to do this, but Gmail only offers POP access or standard webmail.

So I wanted a solution that would synchronise my profile across Windows and Linux so both clients had the same set of messages.

Mozilla list a series of solutions for doing this, but I chose the easiest and less hack-involved solution.

Basically, I have a dual boot machine with Windows and Fedora Core Linux. I have loads of partitions here and there, one of which is a FAT32 partition for easy file transfer between the two OSs. That looked like the obvious choice to do the syncing.

In theory this process should also work for Mac OS X, but since I don’t yet have a Mac or access to one, I don’t know where the Thunderbird files are stored and/or whether this works in practice (Mac users fill me in with the details and I’ll update this post – would be useful for Boot Camp’ers I’m sure!). This also assumes Thunderbird is installed in the default locations on Windows and Linux and you’re not already running some groovy multi-profile setup.

So this post is really to recap my steps so that anyone else with a similar setup can set up sync.

» Read the rest of this post…

I’ve got the new hard drive now (a Western Digital) and I’ve decided to rebuild Windows XP on this machine (but not Linux – I’ll copy that partition over later).

So I spent quite a lot of last night installing XP, updating XP, getting security software up-to-date and wrestling with passwords until they worked.

I’m actually practising what I preach, and I’m no longer going to be running as administrator all the time on Windows (running as admin is one of the reasons why malware can be so damaging on Windows). Instead, I’ve got an admin account and my normal account and I’ll have to get used to ‘running as’ applications that are too stupid that they need admin privileges.

It is a real inconvienience in XP, but it’s generally a good practice to employ when using a Windows machine. Running as admin is like running as root on Linux all the time – I would never even think of being root all the time on Linux!
So, still quite a lot of software to go, I’m afraid, and things to configure, set up, wrestle with…

I spent this morning downloading Windows Vista RC1 (now that it’s publicly available to everyone with a Beta 2 key) and tried to install it in VMware.

Unfortunately, the network adapter driver VMware uses isn’t in Vista RC1 (why??) so for now, there’s just a few screenshots to look at.

Enjoy the screenshots here!

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was the first version of Windows that I used, and I thought I might have another look at it, just for the fun and nostalgia value.

But I wasn’t going to install it on a real machine – I have setups I don’t want to lose! So VMware was launched and I had a try getting it to work on a virtual machine.
Just a word – the original machine which ran WfW 3.11 no longer has it installed; not that Microsoft would be too worried about multiple machine uses of an essentially dead product. The machine originally came with IBM PC DOS and OS/2 (neither of which now live on it either).

Initially, I was going to put PC DOS on the VM first, because Windows at this stage wasn’t really an OS in its own right, it needed DOS to run the setup. However the IBM PC DOS floppies weren’t looking too good, and the PC DOS install had a hiccup. It completed, but important stuff like himem.sys (deals with extended memory, so you can have over 640k RAM) weren’t installed, so it wasn’t much use.

So instead I downloaded FreeDOS, the free and open source DOS system, that claims pretty damn good compatibility with MS-DOS. I had to find a mirror that worked, and a version that worked, but when I did, I successfully installed FreeDOS on my 200 MB virtual hard drive.

Now, to the Windows install – with screenshots (click any one to make it bigger, thanks Zooomr)!
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I think the video speaks for itself here.

Popular Windows freeware site Sysinternals has apparently been taken over by Microsoft. The guys at Sysinternals do some really cool freeware for Windows, including the awesome Rootkit Revealer amongst many other useful tools.

Unfortunately, this acquisition by Microsoft could spell trouble for the freeware tools, as we now don’t know what Microsoft might choose to do with them. They could take them offline; or worse, they could force Windows Genuine Advantage validation on them. Don’t get me started on WGA – it’s a terrible idea and as far as I’m concerned it’s spyware (this is coming from someone with genuine Windows, by the way).

So I’d recommend downloading them all now – we don’t know what Microsoft might choose to do with the code. I can’t help thinking the anti-rootkit technology might make it into the new builds of Windows Defender.

I love the free VMware Server. It’s a great product, and thank you VMware for it. But the compulsory upgrading is irritating. Now I haven’t been using VMware lately, so I’ve been forced to upgrade twice, once for Linux and again for Windows. As you can see, nothing on the interface has changed:

VMware on WindowsHosted on Zooomr

OK there’s probably bugfixes, but it’s not like it was particularly buggy before!

By the way, I hosted this image on Zoomr, because they’re offering free Pro accounts to any bloggers who host on Zoomr, check it out. They look a bit similar to Flickr, but officially they allow non-photo uploading (perfect for my screenshots!).

Yes, you read that correctly. According to BBC News, MS are going to release free downloadable tools that allow Microsoft Office programs to save in the freely available and open OpenDocument format.

OpenDocument is already used as the primary format for OpenOffice.org, KOffice and some of the Gnome office tools like Abiword (actually I think Abiword is desktop neutral, someone correct me here) and Gnumeric.

Only thing I would like, is I’d like to see this functionality built into Office 2007, not just available as a download.

Still, this is great progress. Keep it up MS.

Great article coming up. For those of you unwilling to jump to Linux just yet (wait, I’m supposed to like all the platforms aren’t I?), there is a great tutorial at Gizbuzz explaining how to get a Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP server up and running.

It’s from the beginner’s perspective and focuses on installing the AMP bundle XAMPP (of which Mac OS X and Linux versions are also available).

Check it out if you’re interested, oh, and digg it too.

Just thought I’d say that I’ve started watching a new vodcast, CommandN.

Despite the rather Mac-centric sounding name (Command being a Macintosh-specific key on the keyboard), it’s actually fairly platform-independent from the few episodes I’ve watched (no sign of Linux, though). It focuses on the tech stories of each week and gives some good links to sites around the web. It’s not exactly ground-breaking, but it is quite good to catch up on those tech stories I’ve missed and getting some good links to sites around the web.

Watch the latest episode here.