I have seen a lot of comparisons of Linux (especially Ubuntu) to Microsoft OS’s, but lately, most of the comparisons are to Vista. It makes sense, of course- Vista is the new kid, presumable the heir to Microsoft’s OS legacy. But more and more I’m wondering is XP won’t stick around (and be supported) longer than anyone thought. And XP may be the biggest competitor Linux has to face.

Thing is, Linux supporters WANT to compare Linux to Vista. Vista is an easy target, called “perhaps the most frustrating product Microsoft has yet heaved onto the computing public” by some, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Meanwhile, XP is finding its way to a variety of low cost computers and proving to work very well. Two recent stories I have noticed:

Meredith Farkas purchased a Cloudbook and had troubles with it. Her husband installed XP on it, and the thing worked much better than it did with Linux.

OLPC News says Windows will be on the OLPC in no time. OLPC welcomes this. For the record, I don’t think a choice of operating systems is a bad thing, as long as it does not detract from Sugar and customizing Linux for the OLPC.

In Meredith’s story, especially, we find a case of where XP just worked. It’s not surprising- XP has been around for years, and all sorts of companies have been doing R&D for Microsoft. Of course that adds up to a OS that works fairly well on just about anything. And I can say from my own experience that XP is not the horror story many make it out to be- it’s a pretty stable OS, especially when I don’t go overboard with installing every new program I find. Plus, XP has some of the lowest system requirements around. Even Xubuntu recommends at least 256 megs of memory, 128 megs more than XP. (Granted, I have not tried running XP on 128 megs of memory.)

The makers of the Cloudbook didn’t appear to optimize the OS at ALL for the system- some of the setup screens were too big for the screen’s small resolution! The OLPC has power issues that keep me from using it as intended- the promised power management isn’t here yet, and 4 hours is a far cry from the promised battery longevity (one of the reasons I bought the laptop.) I’m not saying I wouldn’t have bought the OLPC had I known, but if the XP can manage to put the computer to sleep upon close, it will be a huge step towards working for what I want it for.

I still think the OLPC is an amazing product. The design is marvelous- I love using it. And the software kinks I think will be worked out in time. But I don’t think XP on the OLPC is the end of the world- especially as a second operating system. Exposure to more than one operating system is a good thing, in my opinion. (You might be able to infer that from the title of the website, I suppose.) Perhaps Sugar is an ideal interface for the 6-10 year olds, and then some may move on to using XP, or another version of Linux, or some other OS not yet invented. OLPC’s are supposed to have an amazing usable life, so it is not unthinkable that kids who get an OLPC now might want to use it to make money in the future- and that might mean using Microsoft products.

And I’m not about to give up on Linux, either. My main computer at home still runs Ubuntu beautifully, and I would be hard pressed to fine another operating system that is both simple when I want it to be yet almost infinitely customizable. It is, in my opinion, the prettiest OS out there too (or, at least, it can be with the right artwork installed.)

I realize I am not a typical use case for the OLPC, but part of the reason I bought one was to use as a conference laptop. I can’t do that as it currently is- so I would consider putting XP on it (especially if I can use one of the licenses I already have lying around.) Perhaps to some, that makes me evil. I think it just makes me practical.

Illustration above is a combination of my photo and a CC licensed photo by Kit Hartford.

My requirements haven’t changed much- I even got rid of a few options:

• Allows upload to Flickr in the most painless way possible- but exporting to a folder will work.
• Allows tags, and those tags must also upload to Flickr so I don’t have to tag twice. It must also embed tags in the photo itself in some kind of standard way.
• Allow for basic fixes- color correction, cropping, brightness/contrast, etc.
• Not 100% necessary, but I really like some kind of straightening feature (Picassa and F-Spot have this) because I tend to take crooked pics.

The most difficult thing is tagging- if I didn’t care about tagging on my computer, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But I do. I would be willing to import photos, tag them, and then add them to a photo management program, but I can’t find anything for that either. I have so far evaluated three programs in depth. Here is a short list of pros and cons of each.

F-Spot (Gnome Linux)

Pros

• Dead simple to use – one long stream of photos, which I like the best for browsing photos.
• Lovely tagging features- while viewing a photo, I just press “t” and enter tags separated by a comma.  I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts.
• Nice, simple image editing features. Kinda like Picassa, which I also like.
• Has a really nice versioning system.

Cons

• Will not let me just keep the images where they are- it insists on importing, putting into a new folder, and reorganizing by a date based file structure. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t already have a lot of past images separated into categories.
• Rotating is done by marking exif data, which isn’t recognized when I upload to Flickr, which means I have to re-rotate in Flickr. I can get past this by rotating using the Ubuntu image browsing program instead.

Really, I could totally live with this program if it would only leave my photos where they are! Maybe I should just let it go, but I find this a major limitation. I also think it will be very problematic if I ever need to do a wipe of the hard drive again.

DigiKam (KDE Linux)

Pros

• Very full featured- lots of photo editing options, powerful search, can do saved searches, albums, lots of ways to slice and dice your photos.
• Exports to Flickr
• Pretty – it is a nice looking program.

Cons

• Not very usable- at least for me. There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but not for what I want to do. For instance, there’s a keyboard shortcut to add a tag to the list of tags, but not one to add it to the photo.
• So far, I can’t get tags to upload to Flickr.
• As far as I can tell, no “photostream” view- you have to chose an album or a folder, so short of moving all my photos into one album, I can’t look at everything at once.
• Although image editing is robust, it’s annoying to do quick fixes.

At first DigiKam looked like exactly what I was looking for- it is surprisingly full featured, and it exports to Flickr natively (and other online image programs). It even runs pretty well in Gnome even though it is a KDE program. But I have found it frustratingly hard to use. I can’t quickly use the keyboard to enter tags- I have to select from a list, which, when you tag a lot, can get annoying. I feel like I am missing things in this program – features are not as apparent as in F-spot (mostly because it has lots of other features).

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Windows, free 30 day trial)

Pros

• Sleek and professional, which one would expect, since it is a $300 program.
• Has tagging which writes to EXIF info.
• Very quick and responsive.
• As expected from adobe, nice photo adjustment features

Cons

• $300. Actually, I can get it for $99 (student discount), but still.
• Tagging is STILL not as easy as I would like. There’s a way to assign keywords to numbers and tag things quickly that way, but I just want to type in words. Maybe once I get used to the workflow it wouldn’t be a big deal.
• No Flickr upload, but there’s a workaround.
• Way overpowered for what I need. I like the option of other features, though.

I dunno. I actually want a Windows app, since the photos are not just mine but my husband’s as well, so it makes sense to keep them on the shared computer. I’ll have to play with lightroom a little more to see if I like it. I have not tried the flickr upload workaround yet.

Possibilities

I have not ruled out lightroom yet, but I’d really like NOT have to spend $$$. I really like the image editing features in Picassa, but it won’t embed metadata.

I’m thinking I may end up with a workflow like this:

• Import images, rotate, delete bad ones, tag (in what program??)
• Use photo editing program to fix up the best ones and then export (hopefully keeping tags)
• Use Either a flickr uploader program or a python script to upload pics to Flickr.

Keep in mind that I am not a professional photographer, and I really don’t want to be one, so this is just for hobby. I don’t need high def, I just want to get photos findable and work out a process to get them uploaded easily. I have great pictures in my backlog (I have digital images going back to 1998 and scanned images from before that) but I can’t ever find them when I need them. I am way too picky, though.

ooo! Just found this page. Maybe there’s hope…

I have been having all sorts of odd computer problems lately. Well, some of the problems were odd- some were due to the fact that I don’t know quite enough about Linux yet.

Last week when I wanted to present using Ubuntu, I had trouble connecting the projector to the laptop. I ended up having to boot into Windows to do the presentation – so I couldn’t show the sugar emulation. The day before that, I broke xorg.conf altogether (luckily, the GUI xorg editor makes backups, so that was fixed easily enough.)

At home, I somehow made it so my bamboo tablet doesn’t talk to the Ubuntu computer anymore. Don’t know why- it was working fine before, and for the life of me I can’t think of anything I changed. So that’s annoying. I need to remember to make a backup of xorg.conf when I have the settings the way I like them, just in case.

Also on the Ubuntu machine, my keydrive became read only all of a sudden. Don’t know why- I used to be able to read and write to it, but now it is read only.

On the windows machine- well, first, I’ve installed so much junk that it takes forever to start up now. Also the other night I was having weird copy paste problems- namely, it was only letting me copy and paste half the time.

On my work windows machine, I somehow lost the ability to drag and drop. everywhere. It fixed itself after a few reboots. Also, occasionally Lotus notes just stops working through the day. Also, a folder mysteriously appears back on my desktop no matter ho many times I delete it.

The mac at work has been closing Firefox on me all of a sudden- just *poof* it’s gone. It may have to do with the fact that there is not enough memory on it. At least it’s not shutting off every 5 minutes like it was before.

I bought a new video card for the Windows machine so I can watch video on the TV in the living room, and at first I couldn’t get it set up. NVidia has some weird settings that keep getting checked, and I keep thinking “why in the hell would *anyone* want to do that?”

Our network is having problems too- the XBox media center occasionally can’t find the network, even though it is hardwired.

Synergy is acting weird too- the edges of the screen used to map just fine, but now when I move off the left top edge of my windows computer, it goes to the middle of the Ubuntu machine. Maybe it has something to do with the new video card?

The worst part of all this is that I’m in a stretch of time that I just have to get stuff done- usually I don’t mind tinkering around and fixing stuff- but I have a LOT of stuff due, and work has been busy. So, for the time being Synergy will map weird, my Bamboo Tablet won’t work (I’m thinking of bringing it to work for now anyway) and I won’t be able to present with the ubuntu side of my laptop. LeSigh.

I sometimes think that I emit some weird electromagnetic aura that messes with computers.