OS Wars

I’ve got two partitions: Kubuntu 6.10 Edgy and Windows XP SP2. How do I keep them in sync? I eventually, by trial, error, and Google, learned how. Here’s what I did:

First, I mounted Windows on Linux via ntfs-3g. Now, I can save all my files to the more secure Windows partition (NTFS is better than FAT for a vareity of reasons). I also mounted Linux on Windows via Ext2FS.

Pictures

Since I use Digikam on Linux (Kubuntu 6.10 comes with Digikam by default), I set its albums to use My Pictures: go to Settings>Configure Digikam, and change the Album path to My Pictures via the mounted drive you set up with ntfs-3g (most likely under Documents and Settings/WINDOWSUSERNAMEHERE/My Documents).

Music

I use iTunes for music on Windows, and so I changed iTunes from importing in M4A to MP3. Just go to Edit>Preferences, select the Advanced tab, the Importing tab, and choose “Import Using MP3 Encoder” (Screenshot) . If you use Windows Media Player, go to Tools>Options, Rip Music tab, and select mp3 as the format (Screenshot). Now go back to Linux. I use Amarok and Songbird for my collection. In Amarok, go to Settings>Configure Amarok, go to the Collection area, and select the My Music folder in via the mounted drive you set up with ntfs-3g (most likely under Documents and Settings/WINDOWSUSERNAMEHERE/My Documents/My Music/iTunes/iTunes Music) (Screenshot). In Songbird, go to File>Set Watched Folder, and choose the My Music folder (Screenshot).

Videos

For videos, you should use one format. Most Linux distros don’t support non-free (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, QuickTime, WMV and Real) formats out of the box. They ask you to use Ogg Theora, but this isn’t supported by a lot of media players. For me, I say install some codec (see this page for more).

Browser

If you use Firefox, install the Google Browser Sync for Firefox. This will sync bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, and even open tabs. If you can’t stand Google, Foxmarks is good too (though it only syncs bookmarks). Just go to the site, choose the Install Now button. Repeat on the other partition.

PIM

For email, the obvious method is to use webmail. For example, there is Gmail (and you can get invites through a simple Google search). Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail both feel real nice too: both offer 2 GB, and both offer offline-like capabilities like right-click. If that isn’t possible, use Thunderbird’s guide here. For calendaring, again online applications win. Google Calendar is my favorite, but Yahoo! offers a good one as well, and there are many more out there. If you don’t like that, there aren’t a ton of options. You can try using Sunbird or Lightning to connect to a remote calendar.

Office Docs

Most Linux distros come with OpenOffice.org. However, OO.o mostly saves in the OpenDocument format (.odt, .ods, and .odp), unsupported by Microsoft Office. Make sure you make OpenOffice.org save in the Microsoft Office XP format (.doc, .xls, and .ppt). Go to Tools>Options, select the Load/Save menu, click General, and choose Always Save As Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (Screenshot). If you have Microsoft Office 2007, DON’T save in Office 2007 format. Both Office and OpenOffice.org may complain that it will “lose formatting”. Don’t worry. That’s just propaganda.