1) I need some sophisticated software for managing photos. I have looked into http://www.photools.com/ ’s Imatch software, which Iam currently evaluating. This seems to be the answer to my needs. As an avid photographer, I have now 12K photos on my HDD, and managing (and finding) the photos I need to find is starting to be impossible. And the collection will only grow. Google’s picassa - tried it. Deleted it. Wrote them my comments. It’s a ‘cute’ piece of software if you’ve got perhaps max 2-3K of pictures. Beyond that, it’s a pain in the ass and it does nothing for you to organize and find your pictures.
So I wonder if linux’ community has some software like that

2) C++ Development. I am trying to get back into coding C++; and also to use heavily metadata programming (templates in C++). Currently, from what I’ve seen, the only compiler that closest supports the ANSI C++ ‘98 standard is MS’ VS2005. What alternative would there be in the linux world? I guess I’ll have to look into that.

In the end, I’ll perhaps do the dual boot thingy as so many others do. It shoudl be fun figuring out how to do that on 2 200Mb SATA drives where the first drive replicates onto the 2nd realtime for redundancy…

Btw, what storage media does your camera use? SD? Memory stick? PictureCard? or CF? With CF, you’re hassle free - just plug it in (even in windows) and it gets recognized as another external drive. With SD, I always had problems and you need to install some bogus crappy (with cute GUI) application I could care less for.

my usb keyboard did wierd things after I ran the updates but I am sure I will suss that out in the end. I am now running on Kubuntu after a really easy installation going on the instructions on this page : http://monkeyblog.org/ubuntu/installing.html

Thought I would share it with you. Cheers!

Alan: Hmm, I didn’t run into any weird hardware problems (though I did burn the CD wrong twice!). I hope it works out for you!

Luke: Lucky for me I’m not much of a gamer. Though I do have a few strategy games I’ll miss… :’-( Then again, there is freeciv.. hehe.

Junior: Over the past couple of days, one term has stood out in my mind in relation to my past experience with Microsoft and company: “cost prohibitive”. On Linux, I’m inspired, and the tools are there for me to join the community and start contributing. Who knows, I might just start coding again! :-)

My studying machine runs linux for like 6 years now and boy what a difference.

I feel you when you say that “I don’t want to expend hundreds of bucks on an upgrade” because as a student, money isn’t something I have to burn that easily.

KDE has a whole bunch of windows equivalent software and so does Open Office (www.openoffice.org).

Once again, welcome to the fun side of life!

I keep XP on my home machine because I’m an avid gamer. If it wasn’t for games I would probably banish it from my hard drive long time ago.

I got myself a shiney keyboard but it was usb so I haven’t been able to play with a dual boot because for some reason it wasn’t usable until I was in an OS so couldn’t use the boot menu.

The upside is that I just plugged in a PS2 keyboard and I can now set up a dual boot and I just got the 64bit version of Ubuntu and am looking forward to playing with it so I can ditch windows completely.

Thanks for re-inspiring me to do it!!!

You can follow that link:
http://picasa.google.com/linux/

Or get it through Synaptic … so easy!

See you next week.

Marc: Surprisingly, it’s very user friendly. But like I said, it’s got a bit of a learning curve and I’m still trying to track down some equivalent apps for the ones I was used to on Windows.