IMAP and gmail

Most people are probably happy with using their browser for read mails. I am not. I want a separate application, preferably thunderbird, which gives me more flexibility and more responsiveness. I have been irritated for a long time that the only way around the problem was by accessing POP3 to fetch mails from the google service. I have been using IMAP for years and am not going back to a solution that is local only and will not allow me to access my mails from anywhere and from several terminals at the same time.

But there are ways to turn around the problems, by using some free hosting services. Here is what I did to make it all work:

1. I started an account at an e-mail free hosting service that supports IMAP. There are at least two that will work: inmail24.com and fastmail.fm. Both services offer enough storage for a while, the second one forbidding use for businesses. You will have to look for the appropriate host name for IMAP, it is not always obvious.
   
2. I have arranged to forward all incoming gmail emails to the account from one of these services. This account will never be public, since I only use it for forwarding.
3. I also have arranged to keep all emails at google, since this offers me the security of a backup.
   
4. In thunderbird, I have declared the "hidden" account as my gmail account.
5. I have made sure to use the gmail settings for sending emails, since the account is hidden from the public.
6. Whenever I need to create folders or to create filters for these new folders, I log in onto one of the free IMAP services and make the necessary modifications there.
   

Backup Solutions

In the era of the Internet, FileBunker is probably one of the most interesting things that I have seen. It uses one or several GMail accounts to backup your hard drive. All files are encrypted and kept secure as Google. Since Google uses redundancy for its files, chances that your data will be lost is minimal.

OpenWengo and microphone

I have spent a whole lot of my morning trying to figure out why OpenWengo was reporting an audio error. Suddenly, on their forums, I found out that there might be interferences when ESD is turned on. I switched it off, and I could here myself when using the 333 callback number. The icon still says that I have an audio configuration error, but I can ignore that.

WG111v2 Problems

I am not the only one, apparently... But I have not been able to install properly my USB wireless dongle from Netgear. It is a WG111v2 (a real v2), but despite trying to follow these and those instructions, it still does not work. I have better things to do for the time being, so that will be another day.

Forcing CPU frequency

Most of the time, you will want the operating system adapt the CPU frequency to the current demand. However, there are times when you would like to control the frequency better. On a laptop, you could turn it to the maximum when plugged in. Otherwise, you could artificially lower it to test how an application would behave on a machine that is worse than yours. This article gives a solution to the problem.

Windows Cohabitation

I started off with a completely clean new big disk. To be on the safe side, I installed Windows first, in order to be able to double boot. Since I wanted to be able to access files both from Windows and linux, I created a fat32 partition that I mount from linux. However, using fat32 seems outdated, especially since I will mostly use Linux. Another solution is then to mount a linux partition in Windows.

This means that I will have to remove the fat32 partition, which is still empty, or almost and recreate a new one, that I will use as the home partition. Editing fstab will be using volume identifiers. This post and this post might also help.

Firefox Extensions

I have been moving the following extensions to firefox:

• Adblock plus.
• Adblock Filterset
• All in one sidebar
• distrust
• Mouse Gestures
• Fasterfox
• Firefox showcase
• Forecastfox enhanced
• googlebar
• htmlvalidator
• zoomFox
• Session Manager
  

Lately I have been adding the following ones:

• SEO
• WebDeveloper
  
• Cooliris Previews
• ChromaTabs
  

Nice Editing Fonts

I am an emacs freak, have always been (well almost, started off with vi!) and would prefer to keep it that way. The initial ubuntu emacs experience is kind of deceiving since the fonts look rather ugly. I spent some time trying to find out different fonts but could not find one that was satisfactory.

I ended up installing another snapshot installation of emacs, following these instructions. Now, I can start emacs using the following command (Consolas is a TrueType font that I have been moving from a Windows installation and that is designed with programmers in mind).

emacs-snapshot-gtk -enable-font-backend -font "Consolas-9"

Samsung 225bw and Intel 915G

First impression, yesterday, was more or less the one of a nightmare. I ended up installing ubuntu, removing it for OpenSUSE and reinstalling ubuntu in the end. The reason? Trying to find why my newly bought Samsung 225bw would never use its preferred resolution of 1680x1050 (note the weird 16:10 format). It took a lot of digging, but here is what I did in the end. I don't have time to post the links, but this was the result of a thorough Google digging after all the pieces of information I could find...

My PC is a tiny AOpen XC Cube. In the end, the problem was once again the driver jungle that seems to prevail on Linux (I am sure that this will stabilise soon and that a few days of experience will help). For a half-beginner like me, it turned out to be really irritating.

So to make things work, I installed the alternative X11 server from Intel. To make this work, I followed these instructions. Once I had answered all the X configuration questions, it all worked!

The positive side of this... All the rest worked out of the box, including my web cam.

Why?

I am starting off a new company with a number of business partners and we will have to re-implement a lot of code so as to make it work on Linux. So I have dared to take the big step and am moving away from Windows, which has been my platform of choice. I poked around and the choice is ubuntu. I will be posing here some of my findings and what it feels like. This is mostly for myself and tracking what I have done, but maybe somebody else will find this interesting.