Ground Control

Let's get this straight from the start, I still think that PCLinuxOS is one of the best distributions going, but there are some issues. One of these relates to an email package called Evolution. Ised this for a long time and it worked wonderfully with all my google email details including calendar and contacts, the exchange server at work and many other things. then one day it just stopped working with Exchange and Google, there appears to be no help in the forums or from the developers and this is one of the reasons why I have decided to come over to the dark side of Ubuntu.

I've gone for 10.04 LTS 32 bit on my laptop and the 64 bit version on my desktop.

My server however, will continue to run PCLinuxOS as it's stable and everything just works.

The install routine on both machines has gone well, which should be expected so now it's time to carry out some installs, updates and customisations.

The first thing that I've noticed is the version of Firefox installed is quite an old one and this is the latest n the repository. To upgrade to a later version means some command line stuff, which I very rarely had to do in PCLinuxOS .

So this is what you do, open up a terminal and type the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install firefox

This should install the latest version of Firefox and keep it up to date.

The next thing on both machines is the lack of Libre Office in the repositories, so it's back to the command line to get these installed.

The first thing that we need to do is to remove the existing Open Office installation, we do that by opening up a terminal session and entering the following command:

sudo apt-get purge openoffice*.*

Now for a bit more command line stuff, type the following commands in and press enter at the end of each one.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libreoffice

And finally, run the following command to install Libre Office in the menu:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gnome

So that's Libre Office installed, now onto multimedia stuff, to organise my music, I like to use a utility called Clementine. It's nice and easy and just works and is in the PCLinuxOS repository. However, there is no mention of it in the standard Ubutu repositories so it's back to the command line once more.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine

sudo apt-get update

and finally:

sudo apt-get install clementine