Office 2003 on Ubuntu thru CrossOver

Just tried it today.  The install went fine and Word works on Linux.  It is strange that you have to launch it via a command and not through a click but whatever.  Will report how it goes, it should be interesting to see if PowerPoint behaves nicely.

I couldn’t resist

From xkcd:

A special request

Could This Mortal Coil please record a cover of Steve Adey’s Mississippi?  The song is screaming to be rethought using IWR’s famed reinterpretation skills.

Gutsy

I switched to Gutsy about a week ago. Except for 40+ new packages that need to be installed every day, it looks as though the system is already pretty stable. Except for Compiz, but that was to be expected. I really wonder of that piece of software can be made part of 7.10, what with the LTs thing.

Anyway, my biggest surprise is how little changes from 7.04 to 7.10. Gnome 2.20? I could not tell the difference. OO 3.x? I use GNUmeric and AbiWord. Evolution? I use TB and SB… The list goes on and on.

USB microphone

This post won’t be of any interest but people stumbling on this blog from a Google search with the words Skype Ubuntu and USB microphone in it.

If, like me, you use Ubuntu and Skype and are trying to use a AK5370 Logitech Desktop Microphone (this one), you may have run into a simple issue: you have to scream into your microphone for people to hear you on the other end.  It was most vexing for me because I had previously solved that particular problem a few months ago when I did a clean Edgy reinstall and I could not, for the life of me, recall what the fix was.

It gets worse: most of the Skype and ALSA/OSS FAQs out there advise you to do horrible things to your computer to make sound work in it and all of the solutions I tried at best did not improve the situation and at worst…  well, necessitated a bit of clean-up.

The solution is simple.  Very simple.  Right-click on the volume control widget at the right top end of your screen.  Go to Volume Control (sorry if the translation is not fully accurate, I use Ubuntu en français).  Your are presented with a number of controls, put the microphone one at maximum level.  It is not over yet!  Now, go to File/change device, choose “AK5370″ and max it out too…  You are done.

Hope this helps.   I know it will help me in the future, when I do another clean reinstall of Ubuntu and find out I have once again forgotten this simple solution.  The benefits of old age…

Tracker on track

I am using Tracker v0.6.3 on Ubuntu Gutsy and that serahc engine is really a pleasure to use.  Fast indexing, fast response, interesting meta data management: it is really great to see how fast it has improved.

ThunderBird support is on the way, I understand, thanks in part to Google’s Summer of Code.  That is the only thing I still need from Jamie before I can use Tracker on daily basis.

Good work!