September 14, 2009

Run Evernote in Ubuntu Linux with Wine

Before I made the decision to ditch Windows Vista in favor of Ubuntu Linux, I asked myself what I would really be giving up. The only answer I could come up with was the marvelous Evernote client, which is not distributed in a Linux version. While the Web interface retains allmost all of the functionality of the client, it of course by definition lacks the convenience of a local copy of your Evernote database. With a little research, however, I am happy to announce that I am now running the latest Evernote 3.1.0.1225 in Ubuntu 9.04 using Wine. Wine is a Linux program that allows you to install and run many Windows programs in Linux. You can see that a couple of graphical components are a little wonky (the black boxes around the toolbar icons), but overall the functionality is intact. In fact, I took the above screen shot with Evernote. My database, over 1GB, synchronized without a hitch. And the automatic update feature even works properly as well. All in all, I'm extremely pleased.

Installing Wine in Ubuntu is very simple. Go to Applications > Add/Remove and type "wine" in the search box. Click the check box, click "Apply," and the program will install. To install Evernote, just download the installer file and double-click it. A launcher icon should appear on the desktop, and Evernote will also appear in Applications > Wine > Programs.

I found that at first, the text in the Evernote List View was not displaying. This was remedied with the simple registry fix below:

6.16. Wine displays corrupted or missing text.

This may be bug 16146, caused by the nvidia-96xx legacy driver, or bug 18120, which affects QT 4.5.0 applications. It could also be caused by missing fonts, font conflicts, or adding new fonts to Wine.

Try using a fresh Wine prefix (by moving or deleting ~/.wine, or changing the $WINEPREFIX environment variable). If you still have this problem, try setting the following in the Wine registry:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\X11 Driver]
"ClientSideWithRender"="N"
Place above in a text file called norender.txt and it can be inserted into the registry with the command regedit norender.txt. Please apply only as required. (This was reported as being required of OS X on the 1 Dec 2007, and more recently on other platforms, such as Ubuntu.)

via wiki.winehq.org

I may even try running some other Windows programs in Wine at some point. Maybe. But there are so many excellent native Linux apps, I may not need to.

September 11, 2009

Goobye Vista, Hello Linux

I've been thinking about ditching Vista for awhile, and a couple days ago I pulled the trigger. My Fujitsu U810 netbook lacks an optical drive, so I used Unetbootin to install Ubuntu 9.04.

Unfortunately, that process didn't go as smoothly I would have liked. For some reason Unetbootin didn't download the GNOME graphical environment. So when I booted into Ubuntu, all I had was the text-based command line.

No problem, I just used apt-get to install GNOME. I've done this before, but it was very helpful having the Palm Pre at hand to look up the relevant articles on the Web.

EDIT: I have found a much better way to install Ubuntu 9.04 using a bootable flash drive.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

July 29, 2009

Affixa - Attachments Made Easy - Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail

via affixa.com

There was a time years ago when I used Outlook for email. I never liked it. Then I discovered Thunderbird, and I liked that better. Eventually, as web mail improved, I found that I really only used Gmail in Firefox and on my cell phone. I gave up on desktop email clients, and never looked back.

However, there remains the annoyance peculiar to Windows, of the default program setting for email links. This would be those mailto: links you find in some documents and on Web pages. Those links will continue to open in Outlook or Outlook Express even if you don't have those programs configured with your email provider.

You can change Firefox through the Tools > Options menu to use Gmail or Ymail to open mailto: links. But not so with Word or Adobe Reader. Until recently, my only recourse was to copy and paste these mailto: links into Firefox.

Well, now there's a better way. It's a free program called Affixa, and it changes your Windows system default for mailto: links so that Gmail, Ymail or Windows Live Mail opens automatically. You can select files from your desktop file explorer and email them with just a click. And for files that surpass the email attachment size limit, Affixa integrates with Drop.io to automatically create a Drop of the file and email the download link to the recipient. Slick!

There is a premium version of Affixa which adds some extra options. It costs two British Pounds per year, which is currently about $3.30. Purchase is through Google Checkout and is pretty hassle-free.

The free version works great, but after I thought about it I decided that $3.30/yr is a very cheap way to show my appreciation to the developer for a really useful utility.

Since Posterous is an email-driven blogging platform, I thought that perhaps some of you in the Posterous community might appreciate a utility like this.