Computers

[karen2205]

Following the advice from yesterday, I've installed Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office. There were some other pieces of software on the Ubuntu CD that I didn't get round to installing - noteably GIMP that I'll do this evening.

Next task is getting hold of VMware - I've emailed to find out how much it costs with a student discount (yes, I still have a valid student card). Then I'm going to install Ubuntu and/or Debian as guest Operating Systems and see which one I get on with best.

#keble seems to use Debian and that's where I tend to take my technical questions. Other people seem to use Ubuntu so it's worth trying too - since I've got a live CD I'm going to have a play with that and see what I think of it. I've ordered Debian from http://www.cheeplinux.com/ because it's only £10 and it means I'll have proper CDs in case it all goes wrong and I want to reinstall it.

topbit if you can bring me a copy of MySQL on Tuesday that'd be great (Debian comes with PostgreSQL installed, but given that there's disagreement over which one is better I'd like to try them both).

Next question - I've now downloaded all my email/set up appropriate filters etc in Thunderbird and that's fine (have yet to try sending email from one account and am not sure if the smtp server works 'cos Thunderbird sucks at smtp servers). My problems now aren't going to be easily fixable - I've lost a whole load of email addresses from non-LiveJournal/mailing list people. How do I stop this happening next time round? ('take backups' is not a satisfactory answer - what kind of backups and where do I store them?). I've lost my entire email archive from January 2003 to date (stuff from March 2001-January 2003 was mostly already lost after some virus deletion went wrong) and this is somewhat unsettling (though I don't feel anywhere near as bad about it as I did in January 2003). A fair amount of that stuff had sentimental value/was stuff I'd look back on for an ego boost. I can hardly ask everyone who has ever had an email conversation with me to resend the entire contents of our conversations because I'm not supposed to feel this attached to words on a screen. How about all the LJ Comments I've left/other people have left me? - particularly where people have subsequently removed me from their friends' list - now I can't see various comments I've written. But anyway, I can't fix that now - what can I use as a secondary mail storage device - do I want to try to use a server (no idea how) or something else?

I'm not in the mood for being told that I'm an idiot for not creating backups (as it happens I do have a backup CD containing a lot of Word docs - but I'm fairly certain it's got a virus or two on it, so I don't want to open it on my new machine). My old computer could not write to CD and the quantity of stuff on there was such that doing it with floppies would have taken days. It was also full of viruses I couldn't get rid of, which made creating clean backups fairly difficult. And for all its continual crashing it never actually lost saved data on me, until now.

Comments

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Err, Debian has MySQL as well...

[karen2205]

http://www.cheeplinux.com/product_info.php?cPath=32_34_86&products_id=356&osCsid=e1f1a433b583fd99867f763ca97fc3ea - quite right, of course it does. I read through that and thought it was in alphabetical order and got to 'p' and stopped reading. Opps.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

That page just give me a login box. In any case the definitive answer comes from packages.debian.org.

[emma]

If you have the option, use an IMAP mail server rather than a POP3. That way all your mail gets saved on the server, so you can access it all if your computer breaks down again. I believe there are options to be able to access your IMAP mail offline as well. When you delete an email from Thunderbird, it'll delete off the server too.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

You can leave POP3 email on the server too, you know. That's what I do. Just tick the option in Thunderbird to leave email on the server.

[karen2205]

Yes, I know - but none of my mail servers are big enough for me to leave mail on there permanently, so it's set to delete from the server after seven days.

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

How much mail do you expect to collect? (In size)

[karen2205]

IMAP, from memory, won't filter the mail using my filtering rules - it gets sent to its own folder. And I don't have enough space to leave my mail on the server permanently.

[emma]

Hmm. I have filtering rules for my IMAP account and they work just fine. But that doesn't really help if you have to delete off the server regularly.

[lovingboth]

Hmmm, why do you want VMWare? To run Linux? It's much easier to use a LiveCD or dual boot (and the Linux should set that up).

The problem with emulating a PC, even on a PC, is that this is s..l..o..w.. It's doable, and I've done it with VirtualPC (now owned by Microsoft) but it's s..l..o..w.. for anything graphical.

CD writers (or DVD writers) are your friend for backups. The other good way is to an external hard drive via a USB2 port. The best sort of back up uses software like Ghost or Drive Image - they write a compressed version of your disk to CDs / another drive.

Next best is to ensure that your My Documents (or wherever else you store documents) folder is written to CD. After closing any files in it. Where email is saved depends on the client, but you need find it and copy it too.

What this latter will miss is copying the various programs you've installed and set up, along with the settings.

As well as keeping a recent copy somewhere else (parents? trusted friends?) you can sign up for a variety of cheap webhosts with large diskspace and upload things into a password protected directory.

Any decent anti-virus program will simply stop you opening an infected file.

[topbit.livejournal.com]

Mysql server and tools for Debian/Ubuntu and Windows, coming up. I'll see about a CD and put the same on a USB, heck, I'll have my MP3 player that doubles as a file-store, so not a problem.