I have been gradually trying to move my main desktop to Linux. I’ve had a second desktop PC running Linux Mint for a few months now and have been gradually moving things over to it. A few years ago when I had to rebuild my Windows XP desktop I decided I would NOT put MS Office on it even though I could have because of the three educational licenses they give you with a student version. Instead I installed Mozilla Thunderbird and OpenOffice to handle the tasks I would have used MS Office for. This has actually worked fairly well and I haven’t run into too many issues with using email and opening email attachments which is mainly what I used MS Office for anyway. This also gave me a chance to see how free and open source programs work and when I found I could live without MS Office it made me want to go further and try alternative free and open source operating systems as well.
Tonight I took another step and moved my Thunderbird email profile (which contains all my email messages and settings) from my Windows XP desktop to my Linux Mint desktop – it was surprisingly easy to do once you find out where the Thunderbird email files are stored on each operating system. On my Windows desktop I was used to letting MSN messenger check my Hotmail account but I had to find a different way on Linux since I will not have MSN messenger running as a background task. In looking for a solution for this issue, I also found out that Thunderbird has free webmail addons that can be setup to check various webmail accounts so this will work to keep me connected with my Hotmail.
I will be continuing to move towards having just one desktop – because I think I might still need Windows for some rare things, I am trying to see if I can get Windows XP running in virtual PC on my Linux desktop. I will have to buy a new Windows XP OEM license to do this as I cannot move my existing Windows XP operating system which is also an OEM version (tied to the current hardware it is running on) to a virtual version – it is restrictions like this Microsoft has been limiting us with for years that also make me want to try Linux as a desktop. I like the freedom of moving everything to new hardware without having to re-purchase the operating system each time I make such a move. Once I have a virtual Windows XP desktop setup, I should be able to move it to wherever I want since it will always appear to be running on the same virtual hardware – this just goes to show a lot of these licensing restrictions that Microsoft has placed on its products in the past just don’t translate that well to the new world of “virtualization”.
As I move forward with this migration, I will update this blog with my experiences.
